Irish Coffee Recipe

In this elegant spin on the traditional Irish coffee cocktail, Pam Wiznitzer of NYC's The Seamstress uses Irish whiskey and freshly whipped cream.
“Don’t overthink the coffee,” Pam Wiznitzer says, floating a layer of hand-whipped cream atop two steaming cocktails in Georgian glassware. “People think they should use espresso. You want regular, drip coffee.” Wiznitzer is creative director of Seamstress, an elegant cocktail spot on New York's Upper East Side. Her take on Irish coffee is inspired in part by the version served at The Dead Rabbit, the lauded NYC destination where she worked until 2014. She also swears by Slane, a triple-casked Irish whiskey, and a two-to-one ratio of Demerara to water in her simple syrup. Both have enough flavor and body to complement coffee’s heft, she says. When cocktail legend Dale DeGroff was developing the Irish coffee at The Dead Rabbit, he swapped white sugar for brown in his simple syrup for similar reasons. “I added the brown sugar because I wanted the depth,” he told VinePair in 2016. Details matter in this drink. It requires carefully chosen ingredients and calibrated proportions. The result here is velvety smooth and compulsively drinkable — no overthinking necessary.