The scrumptious legend of Irish espresso — and the San Francisco connection
Coffee. Sugar. Alcohol. It doesn’t get any better than this. It’s Irish Coffee, which can — and should — be enjoyed throughout the year, not only on St. Patrick’s Day.
The drink’s origin story is that Joe Sheridan, a chef at an airport restaurant in Ireland, invented it to keep customers from freezing. Like all myths, there are several versions.
One says it happened in 1938. Another sets the scene in 1943 with Sheridan first making the drink for passengers of a Pan Am flight headed to New York that had to return because of bad weather. To warm up the folks on the Pan Am flight, Sheridan poured whiskey into coffee and, because he knew Americans liked their sweet beverages, he added cream and sugar. When someone asked if it was Brazilian coffee, Sheridan replied, “Irish coffee!”
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The beverage came to the US in 1952, when a San Francisco newspaper columnist, Stanton Delaplane, tasted it in Ireland and raved about it upon his return. A bartender at his favorite watering hole, the Buena Vista Cafe, created it for American drinkers.
Today, Buena Vista uses Tullamore Dew whiskey, Oakland’s Peerless coffee, sugar cubes and heavy cream.
“The cream is the hard part,” says Larry Silva, one of the cafe’s managers. “It takes (new) bartenders the better part of a year to get it just right.”
“Getting the cream right” means it floats on top of the drink and won’t “seep into it.” It will have a liquid quality to it — achieved by aging the cream for 48 hours — “but not slushy,” he says. The bartenders add the cream not by squirting it from an aerosol but by spooning it by hand from a container.
The cafe originally used three small cubes of sugar called cocktail cubes, but manufacturers stopped making smaller ones. The cafe now uses two larger cubes, says Silva, which gives the $13 drink a slightly sweeter taste.
Before the pandemic, Silva estimated the bar sold more than 4,000 Irish coffees during a typical St. Patrick’s holiday, but the drink is popular year round — they serve 2,000 Irish coffees per day — and not just with tourists. Silva estimates 40 percent of those drinks are sipped by locals.
In the early days of the pandemic, newlyweds Kevin and Nancie Moylan rushed from their rainy outdoor wedding ceremony at the Presidio’s Inspiration Point to San Francisco’s Buena Vista Cafe to buy warm Irish Coffees “to go” from bartender Nick Pledger, Saturday, March 28, 2020. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
Recipes vary from bar to bar, of course. Some use Jameson, Bushmills or Blackbush whiskey — or Baileys Irish Cream — or change up the sweetener, using brown sugar, perhaps, or organic blue agave syrup.
At Muldoon’s Irish Pub in Newport Beach, for example, they heat an empty coffee mug with a hot water rinse, rim the cup with powdered sugar, then pour in Irish whiskey and Bols Cacao, a chocolate liqueur, before adding coffee and fresh cream.
Mary Murphy, who was born in Ireland’s County Cork, has worked at Muldoon’s for more than 30 years — and is something of an expert.
“I have bartended in Cork and Muldoon’s and made many an Irish coffee at the pub and across the pond,” she says.
In Ireland, Murphy says, Irish coffee begins with whiskey. Add coffee and a little brown sugar, but leave half an inch at the top. Gently pour fresh farm whipping cream over the back of a teaspoon so a layer of cream floats on top. Then serve.
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