The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails Definition of Pousse Café

Pousse Café is an after-dinner drink made with colored cordials and liqueurs poured one atop another in multicolored layers. See layer. Bartenders typically build the layers by pouring each ingredient carefully over the back of an inverted bar spoon so that each ingredient settles lightly on top of the one beneath it, creating a layer no thicker than a pencil. Those layers are kept separate by the differing specific gravities of each ingredient, so the heaviest liquid is added first, the next heaviest second, and so on, with the creams and liqueurs, which are denser due to their sugars, typically being added before the spirits.

Originally pousse café—literally, in French, “push coffee”—meant simply liqueurs or spirits served after dinner; that is, a drink that pushed or chased the coffee course, a usage that dates back to at least the late eighteenth century in Paris (it is sometimes found as chasse café). The term became popular in the United States in the 1850s, particularly in New Orleans and New York City. It is unclear, however, when it began to denote a compound, layered drink. There seems to have been an intermediate stage when it applied to a drink formed of cordials mixed together. It is possible that this shift was influenced by the large number of German immigrants who had begun to enter the bartending profession, as Germany had a long tradition of layering liqueurs.

Jerry Thomas’s pioneering How to Mix Drinks was published in 1862, just as the shift was underway, and includes recipes for a compound Pousse Café from Paris, plus one from Joseph Santini of New Orleans (1818–1874) and one from François Faivre (1819–?), who ran a saloon on William Street in New York, none of them explicitly described as layered drinks. Thomas does however include a similar “Pousse l’Amour” with an accompanying diagram showing that it is indeed layered. (Begin with a small wine glass half-filled with maraschino, add the yolk of an egg, surround it with vanilla cordial, then top it with a dash of cognac.) See Thomas, Jeremiah P. “Jerry”.

In France, pousse café remained a more generic term for an after-dinner drink as late as 1889; Albert Barrère defined it as “a small glass of brandy or liqueur drunk after taking coffee.” In America, bartenders began to standardize layered versions similar to Thomas’s recipes, which were repeated in numerous bartender manuals in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The ingredients in these recipes remain relatively standard, and there were typically three to six colorful layers composed of some combination of maraschino, Chartreuse (either yellow or green), kümmel, curaçao, raspberry syrup, Bénédictine, and brandy. Some instructions call for flaming the top layer of brandy.

In the early twentieth century, the Pousse Café took on more variations, colors, and layers, with six- and seven-layer concoctions becoming par for the course, although one hears of them with as many as eleven and fourteen, constructed as showpieces for the bartender’s steady hand. Where nineteenth-century guides call for a small wine glass to be used, by 1903 Daly’s Bartender’s Encyclopedia instructs one to use what was fast becoming a standard piece of barware, a “Pousse Café glass” (a small, tightly flared, stemmed glass of about 45 ml capacity).

Prohibition largely halted the enjoyment of the Pousse Café, but after Repeal it resumed its place as a mainstay of the American bar. Charles Baker included “these pretty rainbow-hued drinks” in his Gentleman’s Companion (1939), noting that a proper Pousse Café should have seven, five, or three different colored layers. See Baker, Charles Henry, Jr. Additional liqueurs such as crème de violette, crème de menthe, and crème de cacao started being incorporated into a broadening number of variations, including several “angel”-themed versions like the Angel’s Kiss (crème de cacao, crème Yvette, prunelle, and sweet cream) and the Angel’s Tit (crème de cacao, maraschino, and sweet cream). See crème de cacao; crème de menthe; and crème de violette.

In the decades following World War II, the Pousse Café began a slow slide into obscurity. In 1972, a correspondent to Amy Vanderbilt’s etiquette column inquired, “I remember when bars used to serve a fascinating drink called a Pousse-cafe… . You never see them any more. What happened?” In her response, Vanderbilt quoted the proprietor of New York’s Le Mistral, who observed, “Today these drinks are being shaken before being served either straight or over the rocks in an Old Fashioned glass.” See Old-Fashioned Cocktail. The classic Pousse Café was still honored in New Orleans, though, where bartender Nick Castrogiovannoni (1893–1979) of Nick’s Big Train Bar enjoyed local fame for making dozens nightly and achieving as many as thirty-four layers.

The legacy of the Pousse Café lives on in layered shots like the B-52, composed of Kahlúa, Bailey’s Irish Cream, and Grand Marnier, but the ornate multicolored rainbows are now largely a relic of an earlier time. See Kahlúa and Grand Marnier. “If you want to stump your favorite bartender,” the Washington Evening Star advised in 1980, “ask him or her to make a pousse cafe… . It is unlikely he or she has made a Pousse Café in a long time, if ever.” Although there are exceptions—the Anvil Bar, in Houston, Texas, serves some thirty Pousse Cafés a week—the drink has not been embraced by the modern cocktail revival, whether because, as G. Selmer Fougner observed in 1940, “no one has ever pretended that the Pousse Café is ever consumed for its palatability; the drink owes its success only to its appeal to the eye,” or because it is difficult to recreate classic examples due to the change in specific gravities of various ingredients over the decades.

Sample recipe: slowly pour 8 ml crème de cassis into a 2- or 3-ounce Pousse Café glass, then insert a barspoon into the glass with the convex part of the spoon’s bowl facing upward and the tip touching one side of the glass just above the level of the liquid. Add, in the following order, 8 ml each crème de menthe (Get), Campari, blue curaçao (Senior), Galliano, cognac (40 percent ABV), green Chartreuse, white overproof rum (Wray & Nephew), and Centerba cordial (70 percent ABV), pouring each additional ingredient slowly and steadily over the back of the spoon so that each flows down the side of the glass and settles gently on the layer beneath. Note that due to variations in specific gravities of the ingredients, each Pousse Café recipe must be tested. Gravities may be lightened with vodka.

Pousse Café

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