Irish coffee

The best-known account comes from Foynes, the flying-boat terminal on the Shannon estuary. As EPIC, the Irish emigration museum in Dublin, tells it, on a winter night in 1943 a New York-bound flight turned back in bad weather, and the chef, Joe Sheridan, added whiskey to the returning passengers’ coffee. A few weeks later he presented it in a stemmed glass topped with cream, and it went on the airport’s menu.

Source: How Irish Coffee became an international hit, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum

EPIC also says the story is debated. An essay by the Harvard professor John V. Kelleher argues that Michael Nugent of the Dolphin Hotel in Dublin made the drink some three years earlier; what is certain is that Sheridan’s airport made it known internationally.

Sources: How Irish Coffee became an international hit, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum; The True History of Irish Coffee and Its San Francisco Origins, KQED

Through San Francisco. The travel writer Stanton Delaplane had it at Shannon, and in November 1952 he and Jack Koeppler, owner of the Buena Vista café near Fisherman’s Wharf, tried to reproduce it. The cream kept sinking. KQED reports that the recipe they settled on used aged cream, whipped so that it would float, and that the café has served it the same way since.

Sources: How Irish Coffee became an international hit, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum; The True History of Irish Coffee and Its San Francisco Origins, KQED