Irish Coffee: A Recipe, A History, and A Confession

I first had a proper Irish coffee in a pub in Galway on a night when the rain was doing that particularly Irish thing of falling sideways.

Not drizzle. Not a shower. Proper rain—the kind that arrives horizontally, like it has a personal grudge against your face and has been training for months.

I'd been walking around the city all afternoon with what I believed to be a waterproof jacket. The jacket had other ideas. By the time I pushed open the pub door, I was damp in places I didn't know could get damp, my shoes made small squelching sounds with every step, and I had that specific chill that settles into your bones and suggests it might stay there until the end of spring.

The barman took one look at me and said, "Irish coffee?"

I nodded. Mostly because I was too cold to form words.

What arrived five minutes later was not the vaguely coffee-flavoured dessert drink I'd had at airport lounges. It was something else entirely: hot, strong, serious, and topped with cream so thick it sat on the surface like a small, delicious cloud.

I took a sip. Then another. Then I stopped shivering.

By the third sip, I remembered my own name.

The Proper Recipe (Because Most Places Get It Wrong)

Here's the thing about Irish coffee: it's simple, but only if you do it right. Get one element wrong and you end up with something that tastes like regret in a glass.

What you need:

• 1 cup (about 6 oz / 180ml) of hot, strong coffee—proper coffee, not the weak stuff that tastes like someone waved a bean near hot water
• 1½ oz (45ml) Irish whiskey—use decent whiskey, not the sort that comes in plastic bottles and makes paint stripper look sophisticated
• 1–2 teaspoons brown sugar (to taste)
• Heavy cream (double cream if you're in the UK)—this is not negotiable, and it must be slightly whipped but still pourable

What you do:

1. Warm the glass. Fill your glass mug (the traditional Irish coffee glass is stemmed, but any heatproof glass works) with hot water. Let it sit for a minute. Pour it out. This stops the glass cracking when you add hot liquid, and also prevents your drink from going cold before you've had three sips.

2. Add the sugar. Put the brown sugar in the warmed glass.

3. Pour in the coffee. Fill about three-quarters full with hot, strong coffee. Stir until the sugar dissolves completely. This matters more than you think.

4. Add the whiskey. Pour in the Irish whiskey. Stir gently. At this point, you have made a serviceable hot whiskey-coffee. But you are not done.

5. The cream (this is where most people fail). Pour the cream over the back of a spoon so it floats on top of the coffee. The cream should sit as a distinct layer—a thick, pale cap on dark liquid. If you just dump it in, you get beige coffee. If you do it right, you get theatre.

6. Do not stir. I mean it. The whole point is to drink the hot coffee through the cold cream. If you stir, you've made a latte. A boozy latte, admittedly, but you've missed the point.

How to drink it:

Sip from the edge of the glass. The first taste is cold cream, then the hot, sweet, whiskey-laced coffee beneath. It's a contrast, a conversation, a small miracle of engineering.

If you get a cream moustache, you're doing it correctly.

A Brief and Slightly Unreliable History

Irish coffee was invented in the 1940s at Foynes Airport (now Shannon Airport) by a chef named Joe Sheridan.

At the time, Foynes was a major hub for transatlantic seaplanes—back when flying to America meant stopping halfway for fuel and a mild existential crisis about being suspended over the Atlantic in what was essentially a bus with wings.

One particularly miserable winter evening, a flight turned back due to bad weather. The passengers—cold, disappointed, and presumably wondering if they'd made terrible life choices—stumbled into the airport terminal.

Sheridan, tasked with providing comfort, decided that regular coffee wasn't going to cut it. So he added Irish whiskey. And sugar. And topped it with cream.

When someone asked if it was Brazilian coffee (apparently the fashionable thing at the time), Sheridan reportedly said, "No, it's Irish coffee."

The drink worked. The passengers warmed up. The story spread.

A few years later, a travel writer named Stanton Delaplane brought the recipe to San Francisco, where it became famous at the Buena Vista Café. The café claimed to serve about 2,000 Irish coffees a day, which suggests either excellent bartending or a city with commitment issues regarding sobriety.

Why It Works (And Why Most Versions Don't)

The genius of Irish coffee is the layering.

It's not just "coffee with booze." That's boring. You can achieve that with a flask and low standards.

The magic is the temperature contrast: hot coffee, cold cream, the way they meet at your lips. The whiskey warms you from the inside. The cream cools the first sip. The sugar takes the edge off the bitterness without turning the whole thing into a dessert.

But here's where it usually goes wrong:

1. Weak coffee.

If your coffee tastes like vaguely brown water, adding whiskey won't save it. It'll just taste like vaguely brown alcoholic water.

2. Rubbish whiskey.

You don't need to spend a fortune, but if your whiskey smells like it could also clean drains, reconsider.

3. Whipped cream from a can.

I'm not here to judge your life choices, but whipped cream from a can does not float. It sits there like a sad little hat and then dissolves into foam. Use real cream, lightly whipped.

4. Stirring everything together.

This defeats the entire structural premise. You've made coffee-flavoured milk. Congratulations. You could've done that without whiskey.

Back to Galway

That night in the pub, I stayed for two Irish coffees.

The first one, I drank too quickly, mostly out of gratitude for being warm again. The second one, I sipped slowly, watching the rain batter the windows and feeling smug about being indoors.

The barman, who had the sort of calm authority that comes from years of dealing with damp tourists, caught my eye and nodded.

"Better?" he said.

"Much," I said.

He smiled. "That's the point."

I've had Irish coffee in other places since—airports, hotels, once at a wedding where someone thought it would be elegant and served it in tiny espresso cups, which was both adorable and completely wrong.

But none of them have quite matched that first one in Galway. Possibly because the recipe was perfect. More likely because I was cold, wet, and exactly in need of what it offered: warmth, sugar, a bit of a kick, and the quiet reassurance that someone, somewhere, had figured out how to turn a bad day into a good story.

The Final Word

If you're going to make Irish coffee, make it properly.

Warm the glass. Use good coffee. Don't cheap out on the whiskey. Whip the cream just enough. Pour it gently. Don't stir.

And if you find yourself drinking one on a cold night, in a pub that smells like wood smoke and wet wool, with rain hammering at the windows and strangers doing the crossword at the next table?

Well. You've arrived.

That's not just a drink. That's the whole point of travel.