Celebrate National Irish Coffee Day January 25 Each Year
Background image by summer park @ Flickr; CC BY 2.0
A cup of warm, rich Irish coffee is delightful any day. But it’s almost required you down one (or two) on National Irish Coffee Day!
The drink dates to 1942 and an enterprising bartender at Foynes Airbase in Ireland, Joseph Sheridan
He concocted a drink of hot coffee with a splash of whiskey to warm up a group of travelers who’d just endured a bone-chilling 18-hour trip across the Atlantic.
Legend has it that one passenger asked if the drink was Brazilian coffee. He laughed and called it Irish coffee.
The drink made it’s way to America about 1952 via travel writer Stanton Delaplane and Buena Vista Cafe owner Jack Koeppler. The cafe still serves thousands of Irish Coffees every day.
We may know the origin of the drink, but the origin of National Irish Coffee Day is murkier. We’ve been unable to confirm how or when it started.
But no matter. We don’t need to know it’s origins in order to celebrate the day with this deliciously sweet, creamy and warm drink.
Scroll down for some ideas on celebrating this deliciously warm unofficial holiday.
Celebrating National Irish Coffee Day
Obviously you’ll be celebrating with an Irish Coffee!
But wait. The true, authentic Irish Coffee must meet the NSAI (Ireland’s national standards body) standard: I.S. 417:1988. This standard apparently specifies the ingredients, minimum quantity of Irish Whiskey and other specifications to make the perfect drink.
Since the NSAI charges for this document, we’re willing to take a chance on slightly less official sources of recipes.
At one time there was a National Irish Coffee Day website which outlined a simple recipe. Sadly the domain was parked as of January 2018.
But these two recipes are similar, although the proportions of sugar & whiskey are a bit different:
- Irish Coffee from the Buena Vista San Francisco on food.com. But beware: it uses sugar cubes (which we assume are white sugar). Most sources suggest the sugar must be brown sugar.
- Original Irish Coffee from The Food Network. It does use brown sugar.
You will want to follow the recipes fairly closely. Apparently it’s the sugar that allows the cream to float. And you can’t substitute lower fat milk or even half and half for the cream, because they’ll sink instead of float.
Don’t like whiskey? Try the Nutty Irish Coffee Recipe instead. No, it’s not authentic. And probably not even really Irish (other than the Irish cream), but we won’t judge.
[…] National Irish Coffee Day: Fuel your Monday morning with an Irish coffee! Or wind down after a long day with an Irish coffee. We don’t, however, suggest fueling your whole day with Irish coffees. That’s just likely to end badly. […]