Before transatlantic travel meant airports, jet bridges and overnight flights, some of the world's long-distance passengers arrived in Ireland by water.
During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Foynes in County Limerick became an important gateway between Europe and North America. Huge flying boats crossed the Atlantic and landed on the Shannon Estuary, bringing passengers into what was then one of the centres of international aviation.
In 1943, Brendan O’Regan was appointed Catering Comptroller at Foynes. Conscious of the impression Ireland made on international visitors, he reshaped the restaurant to give it a distinctly Irish character and recruited Joe Sheridan, a chef from Castlederg, County Tyrone, to run the kitchen.
That same year came the night now associated with the invention of Irish coffee.
According to the story preserved by the Foynes Flying Boat & Maritime Museum, late one winter evening, a flight left Foynes for New York. After several hours in bad weather, the captain decided that conditions were too dangerous to continue and turned the aircraft back towards Ireland. A Morse code message warned the Foynes control tower of its return, and staff were called back to the terminal.
The passengers who eventually came through the restaurant were cold and tired after a journey that had taken them several hours over the Atlantic only to return them to where they had started.
Sheridan was asked to prepare something warm for them.
He added Irish whiskey to their coffee.
The unfamiliar drink initially produced a quiet reaction from the passengers. One eventually approached Sheridan and asked whether he had used Brazilian coffee.
Sheridan's reply gave the drink its name: it was Irish coffee.
What began as a practical gesture of hospitality soon became something more deliberate. A few weeks later, Sheridan presented Brendan O’Regan with the drink in a stemmed glass, topped with a pale layer of cream.
The contrast was part of its appeal: dark coffee underneath, cold cream floating above it. A drink created to warm stranded travellers had acquired its own distinctive presentation.
From Foynes to Shannon
Irish coffee might have remained a curious part of Foynes history if aviation had not changed around it.
The era of the flying boats was coming to an end. According to the Foynes Flying Boat & Maritime Museum, when Foynes closed in October 1945, Sheridan and the rest of the catering staff moved across the Shannon Estuary to the new airport at Rineanna, now Shannon Airport.
Irish coffee went with them.
There it became a welcoming drink for international passengers passing through the airport. In 1951, American travel writer Stanton Delaplane tasted Sheridan's Irish coffee at Rineanna and later told his friend Jack Koeppler, owner of San Francisco's Buena Vista Café, about the drink.
On 10 November 1952, Delaplane and Koeppler set out to recreate it.
The coffee was not the problem. Neither was the whiskey.
The cream was.
Instead of remaining as a clean white layer on top of the coffee, it kept sinking.
According to the Buena Vista's own account, the pair spent the night experimenting but repeatedly encountered the same two problems: the taste was not quite right, and the cream would not float. Koeppler became sufficiently determined to solve them that he travelled to Shannon Airport to investigate the Irish version for himself.
Back in San Francisco, the experiments continued. They eventually found that the cream needed to be aged and frothed to the right consistency to remain floating on the surface.
The Buena Vista had its Irish coffee.
And then something unusual happened: the drink crossed the Atlantic first, and the chef associated with its invention followed.
In 1952, Koeppler offered Joe Sheridan a position at the Buena Vista. Sheridan accepted, emigrating to the United States in the same year. He remained there until his death in 1962 and is buried in Oakland, near San Francisco.
By then, Irish coffee no longer belonged only to an airport restaurant on the Shannon Estuary.
Its journey had become almost as international as the passengers for whom it had first been made: Foynes to Shannon, Shannon to San Francisco, and from there to bars, hotels and restaurants around the world.
Where to Discover the Irish Coffee Story Today
More than eight decades later, Foynes still tells the story of the era in which Irish coffee emerged.
The Foynes Flying Boat & Maritime Museum is located in the original Foynes Airport Terminal Building and explores the years when the town played an important role in the development of commercial transatlantic passenger flights.
Among its main exhibits is a full-size Boeing 314 Clipper flying boat replica. No original Boeing 314s survive today, and the museum describes its aircraft as the only full replica of the B314 in the world. Visitors can board it and see the scale and interior of the flying boats that once carried passengers across the Atlantic.
The museum also explores the maritime history of the Shannon and includes a dedicated Irish Coffee Centre.
The connection is not confined to the exhibitions.
At O’Regan’s Restaurant, visitors can still order a Foynes Original Irish Coffee in a 1940s-style setting. The museum also offers Irish Coffee masterclasses, where visitors make the drink themselves in the building associated with Joe Sheridan and its creation.
Today, the same place brings together the different parts of the story: the old terminal, the flying boats, the people behind Irish coffee — and, at the end, the drink itself.
Traditional Irish Coffee Recipe from the Foynes Museum
Place one teaspoon of brown sugar and 35.5 ml of Irish whiskey in a pre-warmed glass.
Place a metal spoon in the glass, fill with hot black coffee, and stir until the sugar has dissolved.
Finish with lightly whipped cream, carefully floated over the back of the spoon.
Do not stir after adding the cream. Traditional Irish coffee is drunk through the cool layer of cream.
But There Are Other Stories…
Like many famous food and drink origin stories, Irish coffee has more than one version of how it began.
One alternative account points to Dublin’s Dolphin Hotel, where proprietor Michael Nugent was said to have added whiskey to poor-quality wartime coffee. The hotel certainly became closely associated with the drink: RTÉ records show that by 1958 it was serving more than 2,000 Irish coffees a week.
The idea of combining coffee and alcohol was older still. The Irish Whiskey Museum notes that coffee-and-spirit drinks existed elsewhere in Europe long before the 1940s.
What makes the Foynes story distinctive is the form that became recognisable as modern Irish coffee: hot coffee, Irish whiskey and sugar beneath a separate layer of cold cream.
The cream is not simply decoration. Once floated on top, it is left unstirred, so the hot coffee is drunk through the cool cream.
