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Better Than Butter: A Kerrygold And Kringle For Your Coffee

By Melissa McEwen in Food on Mar 12, 2015 2:40PM

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Who would have ever thought butter would become a lifestyle brand? These days Kerrygold is known mainly for its butter, which possibly delusional people add to coffee now for its supposed health benefits. Although our friends at Gothamist were able to crack the code and found a pretty tasty vanilla coconut version. What these butter lovers might not know is that Kerrygold has an extensive dairy product lineup including good cheeses and now a creamy booze— the Irish Cream Liqueur which boasts it is made from “natural Irish cream,” “aged Irish whiskey” and “luxurious chocolate.”

It’s not the only new cream liquor made from fancy cows on the block though. Our own Midwestern Nordic Distillers has created Kringle Cream, which vaunts that it’s made with “Real Wisconsin Cream.”

First we blind tasted both creamy booze options. Unfortunately, the Kringle has a nose that’s really heavy on butyric acid, a compound that is in real butter and cream, but has a odor between fake butter and rotten milk. One tester thought it gave off a chemical enhanced pancake or waffle smell, that fake sweetness kissed with butter. The Kerrygold tasted frankly a lot like Bailey’s, but a little richer and smoother and a lot less artificial. It wasn’t as chocolatey as expected.

Then we decided to mix them both with various things to see what would happen. And because we could. The worst was mixing with moonshine, which was just not a good idea, but especially bad with the Kringle. Don’t ever try it. Trust us. Unfortunately bourbon wasn’t much better, though the Irish Cream worked much better than the Kringle.

Finally after wasting at least a cup of perfectly good alcohol, we hit on some winners— Amaro Vecchio Del Capo, which is itself quite sweet, mixed into both beautifully. It made the Kringle taste like gingerbread and the Kerrygold taste like ginger snaps. We then mixed those two concoctions together to make an unholy cocktail of sorts, more of just a plain old dessert in a glass. You know sugar has a bad rep these days and trendy cocktails tend to be all about bludgeoning people with as much bitter as popular. But let’s get real: sugar is goddamn delicious. And luckily this thing we created has enough spice to make it balanced. This was partially inspired by Acanto, where they serve sweet amaro with ice cream.

Sugar Is Delicious
1 ounce Kerrygold Irish Cream
1 ounce Kringle Cream
1 ounce Amaro Vecchio Del Capo

Directions:
Pour all three ingredients in a chilled cocktail shaker and shake well. Serve up or over a single large ice cube.

For rum, we tried Parce 8, which was also great with Irish Cream. The “suicide,” the classic dump bucket of all our concoctions mixed together, was terrible. It tasted like mildew and old fish and we do not recommend it. It was a far cry from all the sugary sodas of our youth that we'd mix together as you went down the soda fountain line.

After the let down of the much hyped Kringle Cream, we were hoping to salvage some sort of use for a bottle that sounded so delicious, but came on strong in the butyric acid department. Their website suggested floating it into root beer, so we gave it a go. The key term is floating, because we learned the hard way after pouring it right over our glass of Kringle Cream, this stuff can curdle. That said, when you follow the directions, you end up with a drink that taste just like a melted root beer float. We used a more spicy and sharp root beer, which balanced out the creamy, rich flavor of the Kringle Cream perfectly. We suggest a stronger root beer over a generic sugary option to keep the too sweet overload at bay.

Now for the real test of cream based liqueurs: does it go well in coffee? We brewed up some Dark Matter Deep Cuts and poured in shots. This is where the Kringle Cream also truly shined. It just tasted like amazing sweet coffee with cream and holiday spices, and the weird smell disappeared. It’s what pumpkin lattes wish they could be. One taste tester felt just as good as when she drank the “bulletproof coffee” and frankly these drinks are much easier to mix in, plus they are full of delicious sugar and alcohol to help you get through the day. We'll take that over butter any day.

Additional reporting by Lisa White.