Name: Spirit of Coffee
Ingredients: 1 pound coffee; 9 pints brandy

Why it works: Coffee and brandy work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 213 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Spirit of Coffee

Ingredients

1 pound coffee
9 pints brandy

Directions

Prepare the coffee

Roast the coffee until fragrant.
Grind the roasted coffee beans.

Infuse and distill

Infuse the ground coffee in the brandy for one week.
Distill the mixture to obtain about 5 pints of 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 + brandytop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together213 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

Coffee: Provides the main roasted coffee aroma and flavour that the spirit carries.
Brandy: Acts as the solvent that draws flavour and aroma out of the ground coffee.

“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.