Consider two mood-altering beverages that have been enjoyed for centuries—both framed as vices as well as social rituals, and both featuring bold flavors that attract afficionados, who could spend their lifetimes exploring the ingredients, methods, traditions, and the regions that produce them.
Coffee and booze, it would seem, have a lot in common.
While we more often see coffee in the day’s earlier hours and alcohol in the later ones, the two have been known to hang out together:
- There’s the carajillo, for example—a combination of coffee and Licor 43, recently revived in Mexico and catching on in the United States. But its roots go back at least as far as the 1800s in Cuba and Spain.
- The Irish coffee has been around since the 1940s, introduced by chef Joe Sheridan in Limerick, Ireland.
- In 1983, bartending legend Dick Bradsell invented the espresso martini, a high-octane crowd-pleaser that’s been enjoying a resurgence in the past few years.
The compatibility of these worlds has lured many a roaster and distiller to collaborate, leading to a variety of takes on spirits made with coffee. Meanwhile, current cocktail trends make this an auspicious time to get creative within that Venn overlap. There are several ways to approach a boozy embrace of coffee, from espresso martini–friendly liqueurs and distilled spirits to canned, ready-to-drink cocktails.
Here, we talk to some distillers who’ve been exploring and finding success within this space, so they can share some useful tips and lessons learned from the process. Among the common threads:
- The process typically involves a post-distillation steep.
- Cold brew is often the most effective way to introduce coffee.
- The coffee’s level of roast has a lot of power in determining final flavor and mouthfeel of the spirit.
Making Coffee Liqueurs
Because the range of coffees, growing regions, roast levels, and drinks is so wide-ranging, it can help to zero in on a particular point of inspiration when developing a recipe.
When Tropical Distillers in Miami decided to add a coffee-flavored version to their J.F. Haden’s line of liqueurs, they looked first to the city’s Cuban influences. J.F. Haden’s Espresso Liqueur, at 20 percent ABV, evokes the Cuban colada—espresso topped with a brown-sugary foam.
They partnered with Miami specialty roaster Per’La to develop a proprietary blend of beans and roasting profile, says master distiller Jason Ericson. The coffee arrives pre-ground from Per’La, and the team first makes a cold brew with it.
“It’s a little over a gallon of water to a pound of beans,” he says. “We put it in a large container and let it sit for at least 24 hours, passive soaking. We then hook it up to [the] pump and recirculate it—it filters through itself, through the ground beans, and extracts as much flavor as possible.” They add the extraction to Tropical’s neutral-grain spirit, along with some pure cane sugar for a touch of sweetness.
“I’ve worked with coffee rums and other products, where we sweetened it with demerara, but that was a lighter roast and needed that demerara flavor to balance it out,” he says. “Because we’re using an espresso roast, there’s already so much flavor coming from that. So, we’re using this neutral sugar to not add flavor, really, but just balance the roasted notes.”
Instead of a neutral spirit, Chicago’s Rhine Hall Distillery uses a less common base for a more complex flavor. Cofounder Jennifer Solberg Katzman says their Coffee Liqueur starts with an all-fruit base—partly a barrel-aged pineapple distillate, supplemented by other fruit distillates.
“It’s a bunch of other fruit tails that were redistilled to become a fruit medley,” Katzman says. “It still has a fruity aromatic quality to it, and the backbone has a little more viscosity to it than you’d expect from a neutral grain or grape spirit—ours is not neutral at all. The barrel-aged pineapple adds a little weight and wood to it, too.”
The Rhine Hall team experimented with adding a cold brew to the distillate, but instead they landed on a coffee concentrate—slightly diluted—from a neighboring business. Katzman says that led to a higher yield and cleaner product. They also use a vanilla-infused demerara simple syrup; they scrape out the Tahitian vanilla beans, cook, and macerate in the sugar for “as long as possible,” she says.
The liqueur is a demonstration of patience: The pineapple distillate ages for a year or two, and Rhine Hall allows the finished liqueur to settle for at least six months before selling.
Making Coffee Whiskeys
In Brooklyn, New York, Kings County Distillery’s Coffee Whiskey is a product of Kentucky-raised cofounder and distiller Colin Spoelman’s appreciation for flavored moonshine, a nod to current cocktail preferences, and a partnership with nearby roaster Parlor Coffee. The process begins with a blend.
“The base is corn whiskey, whiskey right off the still, but we also add in some aged whiskey,” Spoelman says, “so, it has a little bit of that aged profile, but it’s not as expensive.” He also says their Coffee Whiskey is a great way to avoid taxing their aged inventory: “How can we make a whiskey that fills a niche but doesn’t necessarily pull down a lot of our valuable aging whiskey?”
They make a cold brew with the coffee from Parlor, and Spoelman says they use that brew instead of additional water to slowly proof down the whiskey, over a week or so, from about 60 to 40 percent ABV. They also add a small amount of demerara sugar syrup for a very lightly sweetened balance.
The result is a good example of why working with coffee can be appealing to distillers.
“Coffee becomes very expressive when combined with alcohol,” Spoelman says. Coffee has water-soluble flavors as well as alcohol-soluble flavors, he says, and those play especially well with the complex profiles of aged whiskeys. “You get really nice brown sugar, graham cracker, vanilla from the whiskey side, and then tropical notes from the coffee.”
Because flavors hinge so much on the roast, distillers should be intentional about their research and sourcing. At Devils River Whiskey in San Antonio, CEO and master distiller Mike Cameron says they get their coffee from a local roaster that sources beans from Brazil, Columbia, and Nicaragua. They like their roast toward the darker end, a Vienna roast, for some richer, darker flavors and chocolate notes.
After some fine-tuning, Cameron says they settled on a steeping process to combine the bourbon and coffee. “We have the whiskey in huge tanks and pitch these giant tea-like bags directly into the whiskey.”
Time and temperature are critical, he says. Leave the coffee in too long, and you’ll get tannins and strong astringency. Pull it too soon, and there won’t be enough coffee character. Respectively, warmer or cooler temperatures can accelerate or decelerate the steeping; Cameron says they’ve landed on keeping the liquid at room temperature. After the steep, they mix everything together with an agitator inside the tank.
Devils River also puts a unique emphasis on the sugar. Cameron says he wanted something “wonderfully natural-tasting, a clean kind of sweet.” So, he traveled to Jalisco, Mexico, and formed a relationship with an agave farmer, choosing a 100 percent Blue Weber agave syrup. Cameron says he believes this step sets their Coffee Bourbon apart from other, big-brand iterations that use artificial sweeteners.
In Beacon, New York, another coffee spirit is the product of a distillery-roaster partnership. Denning’s Point Distillery co-owner Susan Johnson says they knew they wanted to work with Trax Coffee Roasters to make their Beacon Coffee Bourbon, launched in 2021.
“We played with around 10 to 15 different iterations to find true balance, in order to enjoy the coffee and bourbon equally,” Johnson says. “We narrowed it down to their organic Sumatra roast.” She says this roast was able to stand up to their bourbon, which has full-bodied, rounded flavors of vanilla, butterscotch, and some baking spices. “The coffee we’ve chosen is medium- to strong-bodied and has a punch that can stand up to that.”
The Denning’s Point team blends their own bourbon with a cold brew, and they don’t add any sweetener. Johnson says that besides finding the right coffee roast, it also took time to dial in the right blend of bourbon and coffee. They want both to stand out and yet be in harmony with each other, and they decided that any sweetening could disrupt that balance and introduce unwanted flavors. Johnson says she’d also rather leave it up to drinkers to decide whether they want to sweeten it on their own, via a cocktail.
Making Other Spirits with Coffee
Whiskey tends to be the most popular spirit to match with coffee, but there are others, including vodka. However, at Long Road Distillers in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the answer is amaro.
Long Road owner Jon O’Connor says he had been talking for a while with the owner of Madcap Coffee about how to use coffee in a spirit. “Coffee liqueur has its place and can be of quality, but we talked about how coffee both is a flavor and also has a variety of flavors and can pick up other notes,” he says. “We’re both amaro fans and thought the flavors there would play really well together. Those traditional bitter notes would work with things like chicory and orange.” That collaboration resulted in Long Road’s Amaro Pazzo.
Rather than a darker roast, Long Road uses a washed coffee featuring bright citrus notes and a touch of acidity. (Most of Madcap’s coffees are on a lighter scale, O’Connor says, showcasing more of the bean’s true character without the over-roasting that can mask nuances.) One of Madcap’s partner companies turns the beans into a coffee concentrate. O’Connor starts with a neutral spirit and does a maceration with herbs and botanicals before adding the coffee, made by diluting the concentrate.
Like Spoelman, O’Connor primarily uses the coffee to proof the amaro down, only adding water as needed to get to 35 percent ABV for bottling. He adds a small amount of cane sugar, just for balance. In all, the process takes about a week: the botanical soak, blending, then allowing the amaro to settle before light filtration and bottling.
Amaro Pazzo’s bottle advises consumers to shake before serving. “It’s not very filtered because we’re trying to not strip out the flavors,” O’Connor says.
Coffee Plus Booze, Ready to Drink
Amaro is catching on as a fresh way to differentiate coffee cocktails. The St. Agrestis distillery in Brooklyn, for example, is known for its nonalcoholic Phony Negroni—but one of its most popular products is the Phony Espresso Negroni. A 12-pack of 200 ml bottles goes for $64.99.
Michigan’s Long Road is also planning to launch an RTD espresso martini using their Amaro Pazzo. “We’re using the amaro instead of the traditional coffee liqueur,” O’Connor says. “It’s bitter, so there has to be balance [in the cocktail]. It features vodka, Madcap’s coffee, and Amaro Pazzo, and we’re treating that with nitrogen like a canned Guinness, where you get that creaminess. You shake it up, pour it out, and it cascades with this rich but delicate mouthfeel.”
Finding the right blend of ingredients is the main hurdle for creating bottled or canned coffee cocktails—especially those with which consumers are familiar, such as the espresso martini. You want to spark recognition and deliver on expectations and yet find subtle ways to make your iteration stand out in the crowd, says Charlie Grace, cofounder of NightOwl canned espresso martinis.
“Not all espresso martinis are created equal,” Grace says. “Some are made with real espresso, others are made with cold brew.”
While bartenders often add liqueurs such as Bailey’s or Kahlua for creaminess, canned cocktail purveyors can instead nitrogenate, Grace says. Liqueur and/or liquid nitrogen, primary spirit, sweeteners, coffee choices—these are the decisions that can make or break an RTD espresso martini.
“There is a reason why an espresso martini ready-to-drink brand has not yet dominated the market,” Grace says. “It’s a really challenging formula to get right.”
Grace says it took 18 months to fine-tune NightOwl’s recipe. There are two versions: one with vodka and one with tequila from the Orendain distillery in Jalisco. Each has a double shot of espresso made with Brazilian-roast coffee (and 100 milligrams of caffeine). Instead of artificial sweeteners, NightOwl uses a touch of vanilla.
Coffee presents an intriguing palette of flavors and aromas with which to deepen liqueurs, spirits, and cocktails. A world of different options extends outward from relatively few process decisions. And consumers appear eager to taste them and find out what the buzz is about.