Hard Coffee: The Alcoholic Coffee Drinks, Sorted

Hard coffee usually means the canned ready-to-drink category that appeared in the late 2010s, but the phrase gets applied to three quite different things. Separating them makes it much easier to know what to order.

The three families

Canned hard coffee. Pre-mixed, chilled, typically four to eight percent alcohol, often built on a malt base with coffee flavour rather than on brewed coffee. Convenient, sweet, and rarely interesting.

Coffee cocktails. Made to order with fresh coffee or espresso. The espresso martini, the Irish coffee, the carajillo. This is where the good drinks are.

Coffee liqueurs. Ingredients rather than drinks: sweetened spirits flavoured with coffee, used in the cocktails above.

The cocktails worth knowing

• Espresso martini. Fresh espresso, vodka, coffee liqueur and a touch of sugar, shaken hard and served up. The espresso must be fresh: the foam on top comes from crema and disappears within minutes of pulling the shot.
• Irish coffee. Hot coffee, brown sugar, Irish whiskey, lightly whipped cream floated on top. Ruined universally by whipping the cream too stiff.
• Carajillo. Spanish and Mexican. Espresso and a spirit, most often Licor 43 in Mexico or brandy in Spain. The simplest of the three and the easiest to get right.
• Cafe corretto. Italian. An espresso "corrected" with a splash of grappa or sambuca, drunk standing at the bar.

Making them at home

The version that works best at home is not any of the above: it is cold brew concentrate with a measure of spirit over ice.

Cold brew is already concentrated, already cold, and low enough in acid that it takes alcohol without turning sharp. A dark rum or a decent bourbon, a little demerara syrup, and nothing else. It is a better drink than most canned hard coffee and costs a fraction of it.

If you are making an espresso martini, pull the shot immediately before shaking. Every minute it waits costs you the foam, for the same reason a shakerato has to be made fast.

One thing worth saying plainly

Caffeine does not reduce intoxication. It masks the sedative cues that normally tell you how much you have had, which is why caffeinated alcoholic drinks have a long association with people misjudging their state. That is a reason to treat a strong coffee cocktail as the drink it is, not as a coffee.