Coffee liqueurs make a splash in cocktails
By Camper English, Special to The San Francisco Chronicle
The craze for organic, shade-grown, micro-roasted slow-drip coffee has percolated into the cocktail world. Bartenders are improving classic coffee drinks, finding ways to harness the beans’ bitter, aromatic qualities rather than just the caffeine kick.
Most cold coffee cocktails served in the past 20 or so years have been variations of the vodka espresso (better known as the espresso martini) credited to British bartender Dick Bradsell and made with vodka, espresso and Kahlua and Tia Maria coffee liqueurs. Nopa bar manager Neyah White updated this drink about three years ago, creating the Blue Bottle martini with Blue Bottle espresso, vodka and Araku coffee liqueur. It was, and is, “a ridiculously big seller,” White says.
Coffee liqueur got a good bit more serious with the April release of Firelit Spirits Coffee Liqueur, made with coffee from Oakland’s Blue Bottle coffee roasters and brandy from distiller Dave Smith of St. George Spirits in Alameda. Jeff Kessinger, the brand’s founder, says Firelit was inspired by a desire to create a better version of his wife’s family’s homemade coffee liqueur recipe. The original called for instant coffee.
The first batch of 1,800 bottles required several hundred pounds of coffee from Yemen and a multi-stage brewing, distilling and flavoring process, with about one-half to one-third the sugar in other liqueurs. “The goal was just to make a coffee liqueur that was about the coffee, not about the sugar,” Kessinger says.
However, the sugar can come in handy as a sweetening agent in cocktails. Rum-based Kahlua, which dates back to 1936, is most often consumed in hot coffee, iced coffee, white Russians and Mudslides, according to its brand manager. Other established brands include Tia Maria, Araku and Patron XO Café, made with a variety of base alcohols (brandy, rum, tequila) and with coffee from various growing regions.
Tia Maria is used in San Francisco’s second-most famous coffee cocktail export after Irish coffee: the Revolver. The spin-off of a Manhattan was created around 2003 by Jon Santer with Bulleit bourbon, Tia Maria and orange bitters, and has reportedly since been spotted on hundreds of cocktail menus across the country.
Coffee liqueurs new to the market include Galliano Ristretto, made with a molasses alcohol base, and the forthcoming Heering Coffee Liqueur from the makers of Cherry Heering. Epic Roasthouse bartender Camber Lay uses the Galliano product in a cocktail called Hearth, along with rye, bianco vermouth, bitters and juniper.
Smuggler’s Cove bartender Reza Esmaili (pictured, above) is a fan of the Firelit, and coffee in cocktails generally.
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Click here for a coffee liqueur recipes by Reza Esmaili on our Mixology page!
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“I use it for aromatics, I use it to add astringency from the tannins, and I use it to add texture to cocktails,” he says. Esmaili developed a drink using Firelit befitting the Cove’s tiki nature. “It’s kind of a refreshing, breakfast, picker-upper-style cocktail done in a tiki manner.”
But the new flock of liqueurs doesn’t necessarily translate. Firelit’s restrained sugar, for instance, means it won’t work as a simple substitution in a White Russian or Mudslide, or even in the Blue Bottle Martini at Nopa. Instead, White added Firelit to Nopa’s digestif list to be sipped on its own.
Other bartenders have gone a step further and started with beans. Boston’s Misty Kalkofen muddles coffee beans into drinks like the brandy Alexander, and has used grated beans as an aromatic garnish. Lance Mayhew and Jacob Grier in Portland, Ore., have made several iterations of coffee cocktail bitters, as has San Francisco bartender Todd Smith.
Smith used homemade cherry-coffee bitters in his popular Black Manhattan served at Bourbon & Branch. Recently he’s been smoking the beans and cherries over wood on a barbecue grill to make a smoky version of these bitters for cocktails served at Dalva in San Francisco’s Mission District.
By September the first modern commercial coffee bitters should hit the market, made by barware retailer Cocktail Kingdom.
Now drinkers can sneak a little bit of coffee into their liquor, rather than the other way around.
Click here to read the full article on the SFGate Online
(Photo courtesy of Mike Kepka for The Chronicle)
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