Irish Coffee Old Fashioned

Irish whiskey, cold brew, and orange bitters — the Old Fashioned (1806) hybridized with Sheridan's 1943 Foynes Irish Coffee.

The Irish Coffee Old Fashioned hybridizes two of the most historically grounded drink formats in American and Irish cocktail culture: the Old Fashioned — whose four-ingredient structure of spirit, sugar, bitters, and water dates to the 1806 definition of the cocktail itself — and Irish Coffee, created by chef Joe Sheridan at the Foynes flying boat terminal in County Limerick in 1943. The Old Fashioned's formula is documented from the Balance and Columbian Repository newspaper in Hudson, New York on May 13, 1806, making it the oldest named cocktail template still in regular production. Irish Coffee's specific format — Irish whiskey, hot coffee, brown sugar, and a collar of lightly whipped cream — was developed in wartime Ireland as a warming receive for transatlantic air passengers and spread internationally through Stanton Delaplane's introduction of it to the Buena Vista Café in San Francisco in 1952. The hybrid applies the Old Fashioned's aromatic bitters-and-sweetener structure to Irish whiskey, then incorporates the coffee and cream elements of Irish Coffee in a cold, stirred or built format. The Irish whiskey category had grown from four operating distilleries in the mid-1980s to over forty by the early 2020s, producing a more diverse range of expressions — from smooth blended to complex single pot still — that gave the hybrid format more interesting spirit options.