Name: Coffee Spirit
Ingredients: 6 pounds roasted and ground coffee; 20 quarts double proof spirit; 10 quarts water

Why it works: Coffee and spirit work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 31 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Coffee Spirit

Ingredients

6 pounds roasted and ground coffee
20 quarts double proof spirit
10 quarts water

Directions

Infuse the coffee in the spirit for a few days.
Distill the mixture to obtain 19 quarts of coffee spirit.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Coffee + spirittop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together31 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Roasted and ground coffee: Supplies the coffee aroma and flavor that the spirit picks up during infusion.
Double proof spirit: Acts as the solvent that extracts flavor from the coffee during infusion.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.