At a time when wine sales are declining and Gen Z is drinking less, liqueurs—and coffee liqueurs in particular—have become a rare bright spot for the alcohol industry.
Following the resurgence of the espresso martini (in 2023, espresso martini orders doubled over the prior year, while canned versions of the drinks are now offered on United Airlines and Alaska Airlines flights), coffee cocktails are booming, and so are the ingredients necessary to make them. The coffee liqueur category was valued at $322M in 2023, according to global drinks data provider IWSR. Coffee cocktails were also up 63% on menus over the preceding three years, as reported by food service insights firm Technomic Insights in 2023.
Kahlúa has long been the category leader, but in recent years, the number of coffee liqueurs has exploded. Today, Mr. Black Cold Brew ranks among the top coffee liqueurs on the market, and there are other notable examples being produced around the world, from Nusantara Cold Brew in Bali to Café Rica in Costa Rica.
Creating a coffee liqueur can also be an opportunity for local coffee roasters and distillers to collaborate. Recently, a number of specialty coffee roasters and artisanal distilleries have joined forces to make high-quality liqueurs that place more emphasis on the ingredients’ origins and stories.
We spoke to several producers to learn about this latest evolution in the coffee liqueur sector—and how a more specialty focus is transforming the category (and the coffee cocktails we drink).
Liqueur Collabs Next Door
In Portland, Straightaway Cocktails and Stumptown Coffee have teamed up to create an award-winning coffee liqueur called Accompani, which is sweetened with local meadowfoam honey. The liqueur is used in the canned nitro espresso martini served on Alaska Airlines, and is also popular at Portland restaurants and bars like The Sports Bra, Voysey, and Nostrana.
Straightaway specializes in ready-to-drink canned cocktails, and its team had been friends with the folks at Stumptown for years before they decided to collaborate on a coffee liqueur. “Most liqueurs we build are all about creating depth of flavor and nuance with botanical ingredients,” says Straightaway Cocktails co-founder Casey Richwine. “Great coffee like Stumptown has that depth and nuance inherently, so the best thing we could do was not get in the way. The elegance is in the simplicity.”
Richwine recalls that the research and development process for the coffee liqueur took a couple months. The team first had to find a coffee that would pair well with Straightaway’s botanical focus, and then nail the right combination of sweetness and flavor to balance the liqueur, all while letting the coffee shine.
Ultimately, they opted to use Stumptown’s Original Cold Brew Concentrate, which features beans from Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Colombia. The work paid off: Accompani won double gold at the Sip Awards in 2023.
“We only want to work with the best, most transparently sourced ingredients from other fellow makers,” says Straightaway Cocktails’ co-founder and CEO Cy Cain. “Central American coffees tend to lend a really nice sharp and bright flavor profile which works wonderfully for cold brew.”
Richwine says it took a number of trials to come up with the right trio of sweeteners to balance the liqueur. “White sugar provides the upfront sweetness on the palate, but the finish with white sugar is short, so we used inverted sugar and honey to bolster the roast notes of the coffee, lengthen the finish and still keep the overall sugar levels lower,” he explains. “The honey we chose was meadowfoam, which is uniquely local and provides subtle marshmallow notes.”
Meticulously Mixed
Across the country, in Brooklyn, Forthave Spirits struck up a similar partnership with Café Integral to create their Brown Coffee Liqueur. The collaboration was originally meant to be a one-off, single-batch product, but was so popular that they decided to produce it regularly.
The folks at Forthave and Café Integral first met in 2017 because their production facilities were in the same warehouse complex in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. “They roasted right next door to our distillery,” says Forthave co-founder Daniel de la Nuez. “They love spirits and we love coffee, so the relationship began [with us] trading our RED aperitivo liqueur for bags of their coffee beans.”
In 2019, the teams decided to collaborate on a coffee liqueur, with Café Integral roasting beans specifically for Forthave. “We make about three different batches [of Brown Coffee Liqueur] per year,” de la Nuez says, noting that it took about a year of experiments with different extraction methods, roasts, and beans before dialing in their process.
De la Nuez says that each coffee chosen for Brown Coffee Liqueur comes from “a single bean varietal from one farmer and specifically roasted for the coffee liqueur. With each new batch, we do several rounds of cupping to find a single bean variety that is particularly expressive and compelling to us.” The latest batch features anaerobically fermented caturra grown by Sergio Ortez in Nicaragua.
Local restaurants like Japanese-American Lingo have adopted the liqueur for their coffee cocktails.“We chose Forthave coffee liqueur because we wanted a strong coffee flavor that balances with the overt sweetness that you get with most liqueurs,” says Lingo bartender Harry Bloom, who also loves Forthave’s nocino walnut liqueur. “The chocolate and nutty notes work well with the soba (buckwheat) tea syrup we use, and it all comes together to make a rich espresso martini that isn’t too sweet.”
Bloom says he appreciates Forthave’s focus on sustainability, and loves championing a local producer. As long as the espresso martini craze continues, so do the opportunities for such creative collaborations.
