The Coffee Cocktail: The Drink With No Coffee In It

You are shaking a whole egg with fortified wine and brandy, and the whole egg is the entire point, so treat it with respect. Crack it clean into the tin with the tawny port, the cognac, and half an ounce of rich 2:1 syrup. Dry shake first, hard, no ice, long enough to feel like a fool. That is the shake that beats air into the egg and builds the pale collar of foam that makes the drink look like coffee it isn't drinking. Then add ice and shake again to chill and dilute, short and sharp this time. Double strain into a wine glass to catch the chalaza and any shell you missed. Grate fresh nutmeg over the top. Pre-ground dust from a tin tastes like nothing and looks like sadness, so buy a whole nutmeg and a cheap grater and be done with it.

This is a Flip, and the Flip is the family built around a single act of enrichment: you fold a whole egg into a base of spirit or fortified wine, and the sugar plus the fat turn a thin drink into something with body and texture. No citrus, no bitters doing the structural work. The egg is the load-bearing wall. Here the base is a split of tawny port and cognac rather than a single spirit, which is what separates the Coffee Cocktail from its plainer cousin the Brandy Flip, but the logic is identical. Whisk richness into booze until it drinks like custard. That same instinct runs through the whole rich-and-creamy wing of the drinks world, from the Brandy Alexander down to the frat-house end of the pool where the Buttery Nipple, the Cement Mixer, and the B-52 live. Different eras, same idea. Fat and sugar make alcohol go down like a lie.

The Coffee Cocktail shows up in Jerry Thomas's 1887 edition, and Thomas himself seems a little amused by the name, noting the resemblance and shrugging at the rest. This was the golden age of the flip, when port and sherry were everyday drinking and a whole raw egg in your evening glass raised no eyebrows at all. Then Prohibition came, palates got sweeter and lazier, and the flip retreated into the territory of eggnog and grandma's sideboard. The Coffee Cocktail went with it, unfairly. What killed it was probably the egg. We got squeamish, we got scared of salmonella, and we decided that anything requiring a shell and a hard shake was too much work for a Tuesday. Their loss. A properly made Coffee Cocktail is one of the great after-dinner drinks in the entire canon, a dessert and a nightcap in the same glass, the port bringing dried figs and walnuts and the cognac bringing warmth and spine. It rewards good ingredients savagely. Cheap ruby port and rail brandy will give you something flat and cloying. A decent ten-year tawny and a real VS cognac will give you something you want to sip in a dark room while pretending the day didn't happen.