[:en]Today is National Irish Coffee Day[:]
[:en]
Today, January 25th, we celebrate National Irish Coffee Day. According to legend, the hot cocktail honored on Saint Patrick's Day is prepared with sweetened coffee, Irish whiskey and cream was born in Foynes, an Irish town in whose port and airport bars it was served to warm up passengers returning from trans-Atlantic crossings. Tradition has it that the invention should be attributed to Mr. Joe Sheridan, chef of the O'Regan restaurant, located in front of the terminal. In 1943, in the middle of the night, passengers arrived at the airport angry at the cancellation of their flight and Joe therefore decided to console them by preparing what would become the first Irish Coffee in history.
Even the bizarre name seems to be attributed to Sheridan himself who, when asked by passengers if it was Brazilian coffee, replied no and that it was "Irish coffee". Some years later, in 1952, at Shannon airport, where in the meantime the inventor of Irish Coffee had moved, a travel writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, Santon Deleplane, tasted it and was enthusiastic, he decided to import it to the United States. Here he talked about it with Jack Koeppler, bartender at the Buena Vista Hotel in San Francisco, who, having encountered some problems in replicating the recipe due to the cream not remaining on the surface, decided to go to the source to be able to directly see the preparation of the cocktail. This trip was followed by the publication of an entire newspaper page, which helped the drink get outside the national airport walls.
Since there are only three ingredients - with the exception of the sugar, strictly cane, even if the original one appeared to be white - it is important that they are chosen and dosed in the best way, in order to bring them out to the maximum in the final result. Here she is IBA recipe.
Ingredients:
- 50 ml of Irish whisky
- 120 ml of hot coffee
- 50 ml fresh cream (chilled)
- 1 teaspoon of sugar
Method:
Pour the hot coffee into a pre-warmed Irish coffee glass. Add the whiskey and sugar and stir until dissolved. Pour the cream carefully onto the back of a spoon held just above the surface of the coffee. The cream layer will float on the coffee without mixing. Regular sugar can be replaced with sugar syrup.
If the traditional preparation is the most popular, there is no doubt that the cocktail has been the subject of over the years numerous revisitations. In the French Coffee Cognac or Calvados is used instead of whisky, inAmerican Coffee the bourbon, inHighland Coffee scotch and in Jamaica the local rum. In Spain it is customary to drink "Café Irlandès“, with a layer of whiskey on the bottom, a layer of coffee in the center and a layer of cream on top, while a final custom, associated with the drink, is to add spices such as nutmeg and cinnamon.[:]