So, you order an Irish Cream to drink, a cream liqueur that includes a mix of Irish whiskey, cream and coffee. Have you ever wondered who had the good idea to add liquor to coffee and why?
Ubean Explains it All for You
Unfortunately, no one can know for sure who had the great idea to pour a “little something” into his or her coffee, but we do know that humans started to cultivate the coffee bean in a big way in the 1400s. Alcohol has been around since humans first noticed fermented fruits provided a bit of, shall we say, giddiness among those who ate a few too many.
But we can take a look at the history of some coffee/alcohol drinks. Take Irish Cream: while one would think it has been around for some time (after all, the Irish have been living on their island home for centuries), this drink actually got its start in the 1940s, when a chef at the restaurant Foynes Flying Boat Terminal was asked to serve “something warm” to just-landed passengers. He served up a combination of coffee, brown sugar, Irish whiskey, and some whipped cream.
The exceptionally well-known Bailey’s Irish Cream got its start in the 1970s, was first marketed as a “ladies’” drink (because of its sweetness).
The White Russian (a favorite of the Dude in The Big Lebowski) comes to us via Belgium (that’s right, it doesn’t have Russian WHAT), where a Beligan barman created the cocktail (along with its relative, the Black Russian) in honor of the then U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg. It gets its name because of its main ingredient, vodka. The drink is a mix of the vodka, coffee liqueur and cream.
Kahlua, a combination of coffee and sugar cane, has its origins when two Mexican coffee growers approached businessman Señor Blanco about using their coffee beans to an alcoholic drink Blanco was developing. Chemist Montalvo Lara altered the spirit and the drink was born in 1936 and came to the U.S. in the 1940s. The word kahlua is believed to be an Arabic slang word for “coffee.”
Kahlua sounds simple enough, but its manufacture is anything but: coffee beans must be dried and removed from their shells and then aged for at least six months. They are then roasted, ground and brewed. The sugar cane in Kahlua comes after the can has been crushed and juiced. It’s then made to form a molasses to which yeast and water are added (to ferment the mix to produce the alcohol). The liquid is then combines with the brewed coffee, as well as vanilla and caramel. That mix is set aside for eight weeks and then filtered, bottled and ready for sale and consumption.
Ubean Coffee is not yet served in cafés and coffee shops, but that will change as we grow our network of distributors. Until then, contact a distributor near you to enjoy our delicious, fair trade, organic, premium coffee!
By Own (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons.