This St. Patrick’s Day, we invite you to consider serving up some delightful Irish Coffees alongside your corned beef and cabbage.

The Irish Coffee, invented at the Shannon Airport in the 1940s and brought to San Francisco soon thereafter by a journalist & booze enthusiast, is delicious. It blends together your raging coffee obsession with sweet, unpretentious, merrymaking alcohol. The Irish Coffee is a staple drink in the World Coffee In Good Spiritsย coffee cocktail competition, where veteran bartenders and baristas apply their creative edge to the Irish Coffee recipe, and it should be part of any good coffee lover’s arsenal of drinks to make at home.

The Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco is credited with popularizing the Irish Coffee in America, and today the place serves more than 2,000 Irish Coffees a day. Their original recipe will serve you as a solid baseline, and we’ve got a step by step guide from the website Pop Sugar, who sent a reporter to the cafe with an iPhone and a notepad (or something) and jotted down all the deets.ย The image below, taken from the Buena Vista website, illustrates how simple the beverage is to prepare.

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And here’s the original Buena Vista recipe, as reported by PopSugar:

6oz preheated glass
Two sugar cubes
4oz of brewedย Peerless coffee
1.5oz of Tullamore Dew whiskey
1.5oz of whipped cream.

With the above recipe as a base, you can really go wild with your ingredient choices. Here are a few of our recommendationsย using interesting coffee and booze.

For coffee:

Original Recipe:ย Peerless coffee
Bay Area Roots: Mr. Espresso Golden Gate Blend
Chic San Francisco: St. Frank Coffee Little Brother Blend
Presidio Nightcap: Wrecking Ball Gatomboya
Sleeping on the BART Back To Oakland: Blue Bottle Coffee Decaf Noir
Ooh Girl, You Coffee Fancy: Equator Coffees Panama Hacienda La Esmeralda Geisha
Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That:ย Perfect Coffee
Cheekily Irish: Coffee Angel Ethiopia Wote

For whiskey:

Original Recipe:ย Tullamore Dew
Catholic: Jameson
Protestant: Bushmills
Foodie: Tullamore Dew 12 Year Special Reserve
Booze Nerd: Auchentoshan Three Wood (from Scotland, yes, but triple distilled in the Irish style)
Unapologetic Hipster: Old Crow
Broke Barista: Killbeggan

For sugar cubes:

Original Recipe: C&H cane sugar cubes
Bespoke Cocktail Enthusiast: Demerara / Turbinado
Coffee Completest: Finca-grown Panela
Morbid Breaking Bad Fan: Stevia

Whenย brewing coffee for this beverage, pretty much any option works just fine. When you apply your creativity and good taste, the options for Irish Coffee variations are endless!

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