Coffee liqueur: a little branding might do ya
Posted by TheShot on 15 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Consumer Trends, Starbucks
Thanks to a helpful reader who today pointed out this find to us: Just Bottled: “Firelit” Blue Bottle Coffee Liqueur – Ünnecessary Ümlaut. If Starbucks is good enough for the booze bottle, why not Blue Bottle Coffee? Apparently that’s the question asked by the folks behind Firelit, a new coffee liqueur made from Blue Bottle beans.
Just five years ago, Starbucks branded itself with Jim Beam to create its own coffee liqueur. (Curiously, you can no longer find it on the Starbucks Web site.) Back then, a lot of people still thought of Starbucks as a luxury brand rather than a ubiquitous commodity, so slapping on the Starbucks name (supposedly) upped the liqueur’s street cred. Co-branding being such a universal practice in product marketing, the Starbucks name featured no fewer than three times on the front of the bottle.
Fast forward to today, and now we have the Firelit guys seeing an opening with the small-batch and local angle — popular with a number of discriminating consumers these days — leading them to produce a coffee liqueur with Blue Bottle branding. With the Starbucks brand now sitting somewhere just this side of McDonald’s, this move suggests the possibility for more co-branded product marketing using notable small-batch coffee roasters.
Still, we did have to ask ourselves if this story was even coffee-relevant enough to post here. (Including last week’s coffee inhaler story going around everywhere this week.) We haven’t sampled the product, which hits local retail shelves later this week. But once you process great coffee with alcohol and other ingredients and suspend it in a bottle with a shelf life of several years — as opposed to the two week shelf life Blue Bottle requires of their bean resellers — just how much will the choice of beans really matter besides branding?
Hence why we liken this product idea to using your best straight-sipping tequila to make strawberry margarita mix.
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Imagine the cult following of esoteric cocktails to come like the “off menu” gibraltar you wrote about a while back. Lookout humphry slocombe, I’m sure james will team up with bi rite to make a cone of 100% yemen soft serve…
keith, you are so on it with the Bi-Rite “100% Yemen” soft serve ice cream, though.
The precedent has already been set. Back in 2007 when we were in line for gelato at a downtown Torino GROM, we couldn’t help but notice their Slow Food-style detailed listing of ingredients and their origins as part of each named gelato flavor.
In fact, go to their Web site now and you’ll notice that their coffee-flavored gelato mentions their Guatemalan and Huehuetenango Highlands coffee bean origins. Sure enough, this involves the very same Huehuetenango folks we encountered at the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity Coffee Presidia tasting — whose coffee is also served at Eataly Torino in Caffè Carpano.
Coffee liqueur has been done. I think you’re on to the next thing with some Bi-Rite ice cream. It’s up to Sammy to take it from here.
Full disclosure up front, I’m one of the guys that made Firelit Coffee Liqueur.
My name is Dave Smith, and I’m a Distiller with St. George Spirits — an artisan distillery in Alameda, CA. We’re only a few minutes away from Blue Bottle’s headquarters in Oakland. I’m also one of the jackasses responsible for Firelit Spirits.
Most coffee liqueurs don’t have real coffee in them. At best, you might find coffee extract and at worst caramel food coloring (one notable exception that I know of is Leopold Bros. Coffee Liqueur which uses a warm-brew, french-press method and real coffee to create their excellent product).
My partner and I created Firelit because we wanted to bring spirits and coffee together in a way that no one else has done before. Specifically, we wanted to create a coffee liqueur that smelled and tasted like coffee, because most coffee liqueurs smell like Kalhua, not coffee. The only way we know how to do this is to roast and grind the coffee beans within hours of infusing it into a cold-brew process of both water and brandy to capture the essence of — in this case — a Yemen Single Origin coffee. After that, a portion of the infused coffee is distilled with more brandy, which allows us to capture many of the higher aromatics — what perfume makers would refer to as the top notes. We blend all of this together with water, sugar, and Madagascar vanilla beans. That’s it. That’s what we put into a bottle.
At its best, distillation is a technique of taking a sensory snap shot of a beautiful ingredient that possesses a short life span and combing it with alcohol to capture the essence of the raw ingredient. Our job is to act as caretakers and to capture the best qualities of these ingredients at their peak — whether they be organic Bartlett pears, fresh mandarin blossoms, or medium-roast Yemen coffee beans. I won’t claim to make a single one of those things better, but I take a great deal of pride in ushering the Expression of individual raw ingredients through a delicate process that will give them life for years to come.
The whole point of Firelit Spirits is to craft a coffee liqueur that is genuinely expressive of the beans used. We started with a Yemen Single Origin and will likely try something else in our next small batch because its one of the elements that I love about coffee: to explore the flavors of terroir — the degrees of roast aromatics — the Single Origins or Blends that comprise an oversimplified term like coffee. This is what I geek out about, and if you can geek out about it, then you might like what we’re creating.
Respectfully, I invite you to try our coffee liqueur before deciding that our choices were merely branding and filling niches in the marketplace. If you like it fine, and if not, I’ll happily finish your glass. You can find me at generalantagonist@gmail.com
Best,
Dave Smith
Distiller and General Antagonist at St. George Spirits, Alameda, CA
Thanks for the reply, Dave. There is a lot to making good spirits vs. bad spirits. We used to think of grappa purely as rot-gut until we got a hold of a bottle of Nonino Fragolino. The next thing you know, we’re visiting the Morolo distillery for a major eye opener on the process and controls, and just last week we bought a bottle of 1995 vintage Berta Roccanivo.
Even with our limited knuckle-head knowledge of spirit-making, we have no doubt that most coffee liqueurs have no coffee in them. Why? For one, it’s often cheaper, sure. For another, it often seems that the pure ingredients are much more unstable and harder to work with. And sometimes they produce flavors in the end product that are inferior to the fake stuff or the heavily processed flavorings. (At least for the volume producers.)
In any case, we’re sure it’s the stuff that makes your job more challenging and fun. While Bay Area residents don’t yet have the opportunity to try your product yet, just that much care that goes into a product almost always makes it better — regardless of whether you use Blue Bottle, Four Barrel, Ritual coffee, or… And here comes our point.
If it is anything like our experiences with other liqueurs and spirits, there’s the point of diminishing returns. Once processed and distilled, a finesse coffee like a Blue Bottle Yemen S.O. could may as well be a bag of whole bean Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend, for example. When you compare them with using no real coffee at all, is there really that much difference? Hence the comment about Blue Bottle beans being a branding choice.
The logic behind your choice is that a great roast that makes fantastic coffee should also make the best liqueur. While liqueurs and spirits are quite different, an analogy we’ll make is that great grapes that make fantastic wine don’t make the best grappa. The Gaja Sperss grappa being a perfect example. Or, back to our original analogy, the best margaritas aren’t made with the best straight-sipping tequilas.
I absolutely understand what you’re saying about both diminishing returns as well as the notion of blowing sipping tequila in a margarita. Personally, I want to taste the tequila in my margarita.
We tried dozens upon dozens of coffees — blends, single origins, roast levels, you name it. The base ingredients do make a difference. (Trust me on this, because that Yemen was expensive!) We had small individual batches lined up like Rockettes — more drinking, less kicking — and discovered that the ingredients absolutely show up in the final product. Neither of us want a sipping tequila in our margaritas, but I’d rather not have rot-gut either. Maybe the best answer is somewhere between those two places.
We genuinely crafted Firelit Liqueur because we want the Yemen to show through. I don’t want it to taste like Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend or even an Ethiopian Harrar; we’re looking forward to celebrating the differences between these and many other coffee beans in small batches to come.
With that said, I’ll get off my soap box. Cheers, sir. I appreciate the opportunity for discussion and your honest opinions.
Best,
Dave
Honestly, I still call bull. Would Dave happen to care to list say, half of the “dozens upon dozens” of coffees that they tried? presumably from different roasters? (or so I should hope>>>)
the Blue Bottle/St. George Firelit coffee liqueur is, in fact, pretty sublimely executed.
Thursday, March 25th
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Jon Bonne
Wine Editor
San Francisco Chronicle
the Blue Bottle/St. George Firelit coffee liqueur is, in fact, pretty sublimely executed.
Thursday, March 25th
——————————————————————————–
Jon Bonne
Wine Editor
San Francisco Chronicle
the Blue Bottle/St. George Firelit coffee liqueur is, in fact, pretty sublimely executed.
Thursday, March 25th
Jon Bonne
Wine Editor
San Francisco Chronicle
the Blue Bottle/St. George Firelit coffee liqueur is, in fact, pretty sublimely executed.
Thursday, March 25th
Jon Bonne
Wine Editor
San Francisco Chronicle
@jeff@Firelit: Is there an echo in here?
Ok Mr. Bonne, St. Georges is obviously talented at producing a fine spirit, but we still have yet to establish that the quality of the coffee (Blue Bottle) is the key differentiator here? It’s pretty widely known within the industry now, that Blue Bottle’s drip coffees (not espresso) aren’t quite up to snuff. I’d credit the “sublime” to St.Georges. In regards to the coffee aspect, if the coffee did, in fact have an effect on the flavor profile, they could have done better.
“Blue Bottle’s drip coffees (not espresso) aren’t quite up to snuff. ”
Could be preparation, unrelated to roasted bean itself.