St. Patrick’s Day reminds us the Irish Coffee, humbly delicious and eminently classic cocktail
March 17 - 2023
Coffee Geography Magazine
Several places claim to have developed the modern Irish Coffee recipe in the 1950s. One version is attributed to a Joe Sheridan, head chef at the restaurant and coffee shop in the Foynes Airbase, flying boat terminal (about 15km from present-day Shannon Airport, County Clare in Ireland. In 1942, he added whiskey to the coffee of some disembarking passengers.
Stanton Delaplane, a travel writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, introduced that Irish coffee recipe in the United States after drinking it at the Airport. Then he facilitated the promotion of the cocktail at Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco where Sheridan later emigrated to work at the Cafe.
Although whiskey, coffee and cream are the basic ingredients in all Irish coffee, there are variations in preparation: the choice of coffee and the methods used for brewing it differ significantly. The use of espresso machines or fully automatic coffee brewers is now typical: the coffee is either a caffè americano (espresso diluted with hot water) or some kind of filter coffee, often made using a coffee capsule.
The cream used in some bars to make what is sold as "Irish coffee" is sometimes sprayed from a can. Some bartenders gently shake fresh cream to achieve a smooth layer on top of the coffee. These days you can find what might be the modern ideal of an Irish coffee cocktail at Tom Bergin’s, the historic Irish pub in Los Angeles, on Fairfax Avenue since 1936. Brothers Dave and Francis Castagnetti took ownership of the bar in late 2019, after the building was designated as a historic monument by the Los Angeles City Council and saved from demolition. If you see the neon sign saying ‘House of Irish Coffee,’ that is the right place to find the best Irish Coffee in the world, according to Francis Castagnetti.
Irish coffees have been served in one form or another at Tom Bergin’s for the better part of a century, but its current form is a master class in considered structure, built for repeatability and complexity with subtle modern updates. The basic elements is of course coffee, Irish whiskey (Tullamore Dew is the standard pour), a touch of sweetener and textured cream — not quite whipped but not quite liquid, and thick enough so as to form a sort of layered, sealed float at the top of a tulip glass. Tom Bergin’s serves several hundred of the drinks daily, but on St. Patrick’s Day that number explodes into the thousands.
The Irish coffee’s history has Californian roots. Though its origins in County Limerick are the subject of much historic disagreement, few would dispute that the drink was popularized at the Buena Vista Cafe, which serves several thousand Irish coffees a day from a recipe that has not changed since the early 1950s. The Buena Vista relies on sugar cubes as a sweetener, and uses a proprietary “aged cream” technique involving much stirring and spooning to achieve the perfect texture.
At Tom Bergin’s they’ve made a couple of key tweaks to the method, using turbinado simple syrup instead of cubes (“It’s a little richer and holds onto the coffee flavor better,”), and shaking fresh heavy cream in condiment squeeze bottles for ease of use. The coffee is considered as well, sourced from Pasadena’s Zona Rosa and presented in a medium roast, allowing the distinctness of the coffee to shine through. These little touches add up to something ambrosial: The high-quality coffee sings, the dark, sweet syrup melds with the brogue of the whiskey, and the cream seals it all together in a sort of dualistic jig, simultaneously light and dark, cold and hot, sweet and dry, and gone in a gulp.
There are no advance tickets to book or reservations to make for St. Patrick’s Day at Tom Bergin’s, but there might well be a line if you arrive after 3 p.m. or so. Any wait is worth it for an Irish coffee this good, so achingly simple and pure, yet subtly updated and contemporary too, befitting the living history of this remarkable drink and bar.