- 60ml / 2oz bourbon
- 15ml / 0.5oz coffee liqueur
- 2 dashes orange bitters
Stir with ice, strain into a chilled coupe, garnish with a large orange peel that you have optionally flamed.
Our strongest memories come from the strangest places. For example, one of my Top-5 strongest drink memories comes from a second floor coffee shop above a Margaritaville on the beach in Capitola, California. A decade ago, I stopped by and had a Cafe Valencia, a drink that to my uneducated ears sounded very fancy and Spanish, but amounted to coffee, orange syrup, and cream.
It’s the first time I can remember tasting the flavor paradise that is coffee and orange combined, and it began a love affair with that mixture that continues to this day.
Seven years before I experienced the joy of coffee and orange, a bartender named Jon Santer was performing a similar piece of flavor alchemy at another very strange place: Bourbon & Branch in San Francisco. Bourbon & Branch is such a staple of the West Coast cocktail scene that it may not seem such a strange place, but to anyone who has been there, it certainly fits the description. It is a place out of space and time. Inside, it is permanently the year of the cocktail renaissance, and the decor is the mixture of rough and elegant that is etched in our minds as the Roaring 20s. Outside, time has marched decades on, and you’re in one of the roughest neighborhoods of San Francisco.
From this strange place, Santer made the Revolver, a brilliantly balanced mixture of bourbon and coffee and orange, a Cafe Valencia for someone who had long since stopped taking cream in their coffee. I first had one at one of the Cocktail Dork’s legendary house parties, and have been hooked ever since.
The recipe is almost too simple, as we saw above.
When I make it, I use whatever bourbon I have on hand (currently Old Grandad), but always St. George’s rum-based NOLA Coffee Liqueur. You can use whatever variation on whiskey-coffee-orange you have nearby, and in my experience you’ll end up with something magical.
The sad truth of course is that I don’t always have these ingredients on hand, but still hanker for an aperitif or digestif that brings my favorite flavors together. In my next post, I’ll be talking about the first Revolver variation I ever made, and what I learned about bitters in the process.
Phildini is an itinerant cocktail snob and the Editor-in-Chief of Adult Juice Box, a wine zine based in San Francisco. He once had to travel 500 miles to discover he and The Cocktail Dork were neighbors.