Coffee Liqueur

About

Coffee liqueur is a sweetened spirit made by infusing roasted coffee or cold brew into a base of rum, vodka or neutral grain spirit. Most bottles land between 20% and 35% ABV, lower than whiskey, which is part of why the category mixes as easily as it does. The useful way to think about the six bottles on this page is a single axis running sweet to dry. Kahlúa sits at the sweet end, rum-based and syrupy, and it is the bottle most cocktail recipes quietly assume. Mr. Black sits at the other end, cold brewed and low in sugar, with the coffee doing most of the talking. Everything else here falls between them or off to one side. Which end you want has less to do with quality than with what you are making. What Coffee Liqueur Actually Is Three things go in: a base spirit, coffee, and sugar. The base is usually rum or neutral grain spirit, occasionally vodka. It carries flavor rather than contributing much of its own, which is why coffee liqueurs vary less by base than you might expect. The coffee is where the real differences live. Some producers infuse roasted beans, others use cold brew, and a few add chicory. Cold brew extracts at low temperature over many hours, which pulls less acid and less bitterness out of the bean. That is the technical reason the cold brew bottles taste rounder and read more like coffee than the sweeter ones do. Sugar is the third variable and the one that separates the category most obviously. Cane sugar or simple syrup goes in after infusion. More sugar gives you a thicker pour that works in dessert drinks and holds up against cream. Less sugar keeps the coffee in front. The result lands between 20% and 35% ABV, or 40 to 70 proof, which is what makes it a liqueur rather than a spirit. The rest of the liqueur range is built on the same principle. The Brands We Carry Mr. Black Coffee Liqueur ($29.99) is the dry end of the category. Australian, cold brewed from 100% arabica, and made with considerably less sugar than the mass-market bottles, so