St. Patrick’s Day isn’t long off, and soon, one will have to come up with something to drink (should you be so inclined) that isn’t green beer. Guinness is, as they say, good for you. But chances are you will have had a few through the course of the year that make the Dublin stout rather less than a special holiday treat.
You can’t say the same thing about the Irish coffee, as it is unlikely (and a pity too) that you have had one since the last St. Patrick’s Day, or the one before it. Or the one before that. Once one of the most popular drinks in America, the Irish coffee has suffered a catastrophic slide. It’s time to revive the Irish coffee, to restore it to its rightful place of honor in the drinxicon.
The drink may have first been constructed at a Dublin bar called the Dolphin, but it was when barman Joe Sheridan started serving them up at the Foynes Airport in the early 1940s that the Irish coffee began its steady climb to the heights of drink fame. Sheridan shared the recipe with a Pan Am stewardess named Maureen Grogan. Once back in the states, she shared the recipe with the food columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, who celebrated the drink in her St. Patrick’s Day column.
Thus began the great Irish coffee fad on the East Coast, as any restaurant in New York that was chic began serving the after-dinner specialty. Even more intense was the great Irish coffee fad that soon popped up out West, at the Buena Vista in San Francisco. Local newspaper columnist Stanton Delaplane hyped the enterprise and turned the Buena Vista into one of the world’s great drinks destinations.
Normally, such a fancy concoction would earn a rebuke from crotchety curmudgeons such as the legendary author of The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, David Embury, and biting novelist Kingsley Amis. And yet, they were both head-over-heels in love with the Irish coffee. “Delicious,” declared Embury, writing in 1949. Amis was even more effusive: “It’s a bit of a pest to make, but never was such labor more richly rewarded.”
And yet, one day, the bottom dropped out of the Irish coffee market, and it has never recovered. What happened? Tastes change, no doubt. But perhaps the Irish coffee suffered a fate akin to that of the Bee Gees: so popular that no one wanted any more. Amis notes, rightly, that the Irish coffee soon suffered from what might now be called excessive brand extension. Make your coffee sugar and cream drink with Drambuie and you get Prince Charles’s coffee; with Tequila, a Mexican coffee, etc., etc.
Maybe drinks writer David Wondrich can explain it. Some 20 years ago, he suggested the drink had a maudlin quality. He had noticed “far too many times that the face behind the traditional stemmed glass mug is tinged with sadness.” Perhaps, but the face doesn’t belong to me. The last time I was in San Francisco, I made a pilgrimage to the Buena Vista. I enjoyed a couple of their Irish coffees, and the smile never left my face.
If you’re not in San Francisco anytime soon, make an Irish coffee yourself. Preferably, start with a stemmed glass goblet. Put in an ounce of Irish whiskey, a teaspoon or two of sugar (to taste), and fill with coffee, leaving about two inches at the top of the glass. Whip heavy cream; pour it over a spoon so that the cream floats on top of the coffee. With every sip, you’ll get some cream, and you’ll soon discover what Amis was talking about.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
