Wear Green, Drink Well

Eric Felten offers up a drink for Saint Patrick's Day that won't make you green in the face (sub req):

Despairing of finding a worthy cocktail for St. Pat's, I resorted to creating one myself -- a modernistic version of Irish Coffee, one that deconstructs and reassembles the original's constituent parts -- coffee, sugar, whiskey and cream.

My idea isn't entirely original. In Spain and further south (the drink has turned up in Cairo), there is a variation on Irish Coffee that draws from the Pousse Café tradition of layering liqueurs. Irish whiskey goes into a goblet, and then one carefully pours black coffee into the bowl of a spoon, the tip of which is pressed against the inside of the goblet at the level of the whiskey. Do it right, and the coffee will sit on top of the whiskey instead of mixing with it. On top goes the cream to create a three-layered drink.

I too have separated the coffee from the whiskey, but in a different way, using coffee to flavor the drink's frothy top. To do that, I made a foam flavored with coffee liqueur, using one of the techniques favored by the molecular gastronomy crowd. Combine an egg white (fresh or pasteurized) with two ounces of coffee liqueur, and whisk them up a bit before putting them in a nitrous-oxide-chargeable whipped-cream dispenser. Charge it up (bartenders who use this technique generally double-charge the canister, though the manufacturers wouldn't approve) and then shake it vigorously. The result should be a foam as creamy as the heavy cream one uses for a traditional Irish Coffee.

What, you don't have a nitrous-oxide-chargeable whipped-cream dispenser?

If you lack such a dispenser, just keep whisking the egg white and liqueur until you've got a foam you're satisfied with. This is best done by swizzling the handle of the whisk between flattened palms.

Top a tumbler of Irish whiskey on the rocks with a thick head of this coffee foam and you get what I call a Reverse Irish Coffee. I think it's tasty; and though the drink is modern, it has a connection with authentic Irish tradition. And best of all, it isn't green.

There's nothing Irish about a green drink.