Coffee Liqueur

Coffee liqueur is the one bottle most Australian home bars are missing, and there is more range in it than the supermarket shelf suggests.

The French houses do it as a creme. Vedrenne's Liqueur de Cafe at 21% and Gabriel Boudier's Creme de Cafe at 21% are both sweeter and more concentrated than the mass market brands, which means you use less of them. Gabriel Boudier also makes a Coffee Rum Peanut Cream at 17%.

The Australian makers take a different route. Kawa uses cold brew and is a genuinely good mixer. Canberra Distillery, White Possum and Antipodes all bottle small batch versions. Nosferatu's Crema is a cream style at 20%.

Beyond straight liqueurs there are coffee spirits worth knowing: Shipwreck Coffee Rum from St Kitts, Ambrosia Coffee Vodka, El Dorado's Espresso Rum Cream, and Three Foxes Organic Espresso Amaro for anyone who wants bitterness rather than sweetness.

Between them they cover cream styles, cold brew styles and the drier French cremes.

History

Coffee liqueur as a commercial category is mostly a twentieth century invention, built on much older traditions of steeping roasted beans in spirit. Mexico, Jamaica and Italy all developed versions, and the two brands that came to define the category internationally were established in 1936 and 1940.

The drink that made it a fixture behind Australian bars is younger than that. The espresso martini was created in London in the mid 1980s by bartender Dick Bradsell, reportedly after a customer asked for something that would wake her up and then do the opposite. It was originally called the vodka espresso.

It took another two decades to become ubiquitous. By the late 2010s the espresso martini was among the most ordered cocktails in Australian venues, and it has stayed there. Australia's coffee culture is a large part of why it landed so hard here: a country that takes espresso seriously was always going to take an espresso cocktail seriously.

The result is a category that has moved well beyond two brands, with small distillers now making coffee liqueur from single origin beans and cold brew rather than extract.

How to drink it

The espresso martini is the reason most people buy this. Thirty millilitres of vodka, 30ml of fresh espresso, 20ml of coffee liqueur and a small measure of sugar syrup if your liqueur is on the drier side. Shake hard with plenty of ice, and shake longer than feels necessary. The foam on top comes from the crema in fresh espresso being aerated. Cold brew or instant will not produce it.

Strain into a chilled coupe and float three coffee beans.

Beyond that, coffee liqueur is the backbone of a White Russian and a Black Russian, and it makes an excellent Espresso Old Fashioned with a dark aged rum in place of whisky.

A cream style such as Nosferatu Crema is best served cold and neat over one large ice cube, or poured over vanilla ice cream.

Keep opened bottles somewhere cool. Cream liqueurs should go in the fridge and be finished within a few months. Standard coffee liqueurs are stable for a year or more but lose aromatic freshness, so buy the size you will actually use.