Starbuck’s Liqueur

I live in Seattle. And besides rain, one of the other things that Seattle is famous for is Starbucks coffee.

I started drinking Starbucks, even before Starbucks was brewing coffee. Back then, they only had one store, and all they did was "roast" coffee, not actually brew it in their stores, except perhaps for the employee lounge :->

So, I have very fond feelings, and memories, about Starbucks, and quite frankly love their coffee, even if some people might think it is over-roasted. So imagine my delight when I heard that they were going to bring out a coffee liqueur (http://www.starbucks.com/grocery/coffeeliqueurflash/preloader.htm). Once it finally came out, I naturally picked up a bottle asap. A quick taste comparison between it and "that other" coffee liqueur convinced me that Starbucks (despite their weird, and bartender unfriendly, bottle) would most likely be an excellent cocktail ingredient.

Unlike Kahlua, which was fairly balanced out of the bottle, Starbucks had a distinctive and specific character, which appeared to almost beg to be mixed with other ingredients in order to create new flavor combinations.

Recently, my bosses boss (and that’s pretty high up in the company :-), asked me to create a new cocktail. I took this opportunity to think about creating something that used this new Starbucks liqueur to build upon, and try to bring out some flavors that spanned across the various world flavors.

Frankly, this was hard. Very, very, hard. What struck me first, was how "pronounced" the flavors of the Starbuck’s liqueur was. It almost totally overpowered anything it was put in. In order to counteract it, I would have to create and overpowering flavor in the drink itself. I tried a variety of ingredients, base spirits, and ratios. I wanted the coffee-ness of the Starbucks to be visible, but without it being an overpowering ingredient.

So far, my best approach has been to match overpowering taste combination, with… well.. overpowering taste combination. A good friend of mine commented recently that she liked iced coffee with Cynar, so I tried using Cynar against the Starbucks liqueur. Unfortunately that wasn’t quite enough. So I cranked it up a notch, and switched to Campari. Resulting in a recipe that used:

• 1 1/2 oz Brandy
• 1/2 oz Starbuck’s Liqueur
• 1/2 oz Campari

Which resulted in a drink which I basically like, but then I love fabulously complex drinks, and this really isn’t a drink that can be apprecated by a beginner, or even a moderate cocktail enthusiast.

And try as I might, I’m having a hard problem building out what I think is a "well turned" cocktail using this new liqueur. It might work well for "vodka + cream + Starbucks" sort of drinks, but those are going to be "oh so uninteresting" additions to the lexicon of mixology, and so frankly I feel that this new Starbucks liqueur will probably not surivive long enough to be much more than a historical speedbump. I’ll keep on experimenting, but let’s just see how this all plays out.

And if you’ve got any great ideas… please let me know.

-Robert