As you may have seen in our recent videos on Irish whiskey, it's actually a very diverse spirit.
But the more classic sort of light and smooth Irish style is perfect for cocktails.
Irish whiskey provides a really grain forward, biscuity backbone but with plenty of bright
citrus notes and no real jagged edges, and that means it plays very nicely with lots of
other flavor combinations. Some of them very well known and some of them quite surprising.
So let's look at three very different Irish whiskey cocktails
and I might even let you in on a bartender's handshake at the end, and yes I know we do
have a lot of different handshakes, but it's just any excuse for a shot really.
Just a quick Patreon update before we get to making. We hope to do a lot more
with our Patreon channel in the future and we'll be offering lots of fun bonuses soon,
but for the moment we just want to say thanks to those who are really helping us
keep putting out content for all of you. So thanks to Zachary, Paranoia Rodeo,
Eric, Kevin, Omar, Paul and Navneet. First up is a personal favorite of mine.
The eponymous Cameron's identity is a cocktail history mystery,
but his drink has enjoyed a renaissance thanks to cocktail historian David Wondrich's
rediscovery of legendary bartender Harry McElhone's Scotch Irish mashup.
First of all we're gonna have to squeeze some lemon juice.
And then as always we're gonna prepare our garnish first, so just cut around the orange. It's up to
you, it doesn't need to be particularly long you can definitely just take a little stripe
down the side if you're making a few, but may as well do a fancy one since it's been a while.
So we're going to go 20 ml of lemon juice.
15 mils of Orgeat
30 mils of Johnnie Walker Black Label.
30 mils of Bushmills Black Bush.
Then we're going to fill the shaker tin with as much ice as you can fit in there.
Pop your tins together. Make sure it's got a nice straight line down here.
And shake as hard as you can.
Grab your coupe out of the fridge of the freezer.
Definitely one that you want nice and frosty and refreshing.
Give your twist a sharp fold over the top of your drink so you get all of those lovely
orange oils and then you can just kind of wrap it around, and pop it on the side of the glass.
Cameron's Kick.
Now I won't blame you if you haven't heard of a Cameron's Kick,
but you'd have to be living under a rock to not have heard of our next drink.
That said you may not have had a good one. It's one of those
simple drinks which is actually really easy to get wrong so let me show you how to make a yummy one.
The Irish Coffee, unlike most drinks named for places, does in fact hail from Ireland.
Administered as a post-flight pick-me-up to warm the cockles of new arrivals to the Emerald Isle,
it is a drink which is more than the sum of its parts.
So to get started on this one we obviously want to heat everything up and get our coffee brewed.
Get your boiling water, however you've done it, in a kettle, got mine from the coffee machine
and just pop some in the glass to warm that up and then in your coffee.
While that's all just sitting and getting it nice and toasty.
We're gonna then whip our cream. About 90 mls of cream. You obviously
don't have to really measure it because if you whip too much it's not the end of the world.
And then this little trick is to take your coil off of your Hawthorne strainer,
pop that in too. So that essentially works as a little whip in here and just helps to get the
cream to the consistency that you're after with a little bit less elbow grease, you can of course
just shake really hard but I'm lazy. I'm tired already.
That's good. So you can sort of see it's pourable, but pretty thick now.
So that's perfect. At this point then we can plunge the coffee.
Dump out your water. Coffee first, so to about halfway,
you can always add a little bit more at the end if necessary.
And then we go 45 mils of a nice malty and blended Irish whiskey.
And 15 mils of your brown sugar syrup or to taste. If you have a sweet tooth then treat yourself.
And we can give it all a little stir
and then we just want to pour the cream slowly over the back of the spoon.
Look at that, I'm so strong, I whipped it a little bit too much to be honest. It's quite thick.
I'm always really glad when that actually works as well, even after 10 years of bartending,
I always get a little bit nervous that it's not going to stay separate.
And you have a nice creamy head, Guinness looking Irish coffee there.
You can absolutely at this point grate a little bit of nutmeg or put a little bit of cinnamon,
even just some powdered sugar over the top if you like, I just like it to keep really nice
and simple and just kind of enjoy that contrast of the hot and cold so I just like to leave it as is.
Use a little green plate in for Ireland, it's obviously
nice to give this to your customers if you don't have a latte glass that has a little handle on it,
just so they don't burn their little fingers. Irish Coffee.
If the Irish Coffee is always a guaranteed hit, this next cocktail is a little weirder.
Chartreuse may not be the first thing that you'd reach for to pair with Irish whiskey but if you
think about it, we have monks to thank for both, so maybe there was a little bit of
divine inspiration involved in this drink. I've tweaked the ratio from the original,
as many others have before me and this makes it a light and herbal Manhattan variation.
As always we're gonna get our twist ready first. I'm just gonna cut away from ourselves on the
lemon. This one's a little bit knobbly. And then we just cut off all of the white part of the pith,
you can absolutely leave it rustic, I'm just going to trim this down a little bit. For the 'gram.
Now we're going to start with two dashes of your orange bitters. I'm using Reagans. They're quite
small dashes so we'll do an extra one. And then just a little 10 mils
of green chartreuse. 20 mls of sweet vermouth.
And then our hero of the drink, a full 60 mils of
your pot still Irish whiskey. Or Irish whiskey of some kind.
Now we're gonna pack as much ice as we can fit in here to stir down on,
then we're going to give it a little stir by just popping the back of your bar spoon
against the inside of the mixing glass and sort of pushing the ice around so it's nice and smooth.
Give it a little taste.
Still just a little bit bitey beforehand. Then we're gonna grab our coupe out of the
fridge or freezer. This one's technically a Nick & Nora glass, but I think it works
well for these kind of stirred down boozy cocktails. Takes us back to the 20s.
Just use your Julep strainer to hold the ice back in your glass.
Then we're gonna give our lemon twist a sharp fold over the top of the drink.
Give it a little twist, this one's a pretty chunky boy.
Pop that on the side and there we have it, The Tipperary cocktail.
Now as classy as all of these drinks are, and as much as I've been espousing the nuances of
this category, let's face it we've all met old mate Jamo in a dive bar at some point
and as of recent years that Jamo may well have been followed by a shot of pickle juice.
So before we finish up here's a little bonus for you.
This is just straight up an awesome flavor combination, which I think is why it has caught
on in a lot of cocktail bars who normally wouldn't touch something so low brow. I mean, that and the
fact that bartenders love an ironic shot. So it's literally just 30 ml of Jameson
and 30 mils of pickle juice. But I mean even that really
it's not something that you have to measure. Now, before anyone yells at me,
these are actually 45 mil shot glasses so I'm not gonna fill it to the brim.
I do like to get a little snack in the bottom of my pickle back, so I'll just pop
a little actual slice in there as well. Shot first. Pickle second. Slainte.
Delicious!