We wanted to write a really great review about Irish cream before Saint Patrick's Day, we really did. But quite honestly, when actually faced with the task, we kind of lost our nerve. Frankly, spending an afternoon tasting different sweet, thick, buttery shots really didn't seem like all that much fun. Sure, they have Irish whiskey in them, and that alone would have been fine, but thinking about all the sweet stuff made our stomachs turn. And in all honesty, when it comes to different brands of store-bought Irish creams, is there really that much difference?
Okay, so we discounted that idea and thought we'd try different Irish cream recipes instead. The problem is there seems to really be only one recipe, with slight variations, repeated on various websites around the internet. So that idea was also deep-sixed.
So that left us wondering -- if we're too chicken to do a bunch of reviews, and there's really only one recipe to follow for your own, what should we do? And that's when it hit us, a one-on-one, mano ya mano taste test: the DIY Irish cream versus the off the shelf stuff. Which is better? So that's just what we did, and the results were surprising (hopefully they'll help you prepare for Saint Patrick's Day).
First, a bit of history about Irish cream. Actually... there is no history. Irish Cream was an invention of a consortium of distillers in Ireland in 1974. They wanted a product they could sell on the international market, so they came up with Baileys -- named after a hotel in London (the R.A. Bailey signature on the bottle is as authentic as an orange spray tan and a comb-over).
Now, this is not to say that people haven't been mixing sugar, cream and whiskey for centuries. In fact, add some eggs and vanilla and you've got eggnog (which can be traced to the 17th-18th century), but we digress. The point is: Baileys was a product, a commodity invented for the market. But, nevertheless, it's a Saint Patrick's Day tradition to polish off a bottle of Irish cream or two (which consequently pairs with the other tradition of puking your guts out The next day).
So following are the recipe we used, the Irish cream we bought and the results of the highly (un)scientific tests we used to compare the two.
DIY Irish Cream: The Fruitcake of Recipes
There is an old joke that suggests there are only 10 fruitcakes in the entire world, and people just pass them around to each other as gifts.
Well when it came time to find an Irish cream recipe, we kind of found the same thing. Website, after website, after website featured the same damned recipe. And almost every single one also featured the same clickbaity title - Never Buy Bailey's Again! (or something like that).
So what was the recipe? Well here is the one we followed:
- 1 ½ cups Irish whiskey (which leaves a little less than half the bottle to drink and forget you made this shit).
- 1 ½ cups heavy cream (because who doesn't like to plump up like a sumo wrestler going into spring).
- 1 can sweetened, condensed milk (because adding a 1 pound bag of sugar seems crude).
- 1 tablespoon chocolate syrup (really? we would have guessed caramel or something, but why not, after all the internet is always right).
- 1 teaspoon instant coffee (because...actually we have no friggin' idea...)
Put all this glop into a blender, and then blend on high for a couple of days (okay, maybe a minute) until silky smooth.
Look around and this is the recipe you'll find. Sure, there will be variations - some will include vanilla extract, some might have cocoa powder instead of syrup - but for the most part they're all almost exactly alike.
So we made this stuff. It looked decent. It smelled not that bad (like cream, whiskey, chocolate, coffee and sweet stuff). Then we tried it.
Okay, we'll save that for later though. Next we decided to get a bottle of off the shelf stuff to compare the DIY too. But which one? Baileys is the obvious choice. After all it's the oldest, most popular and most consumed (6.2 million cases were sold in 2014). But it didn't seem right.
As we mentioned above the recipe included chocolate, and Baileys just seems more of a caramel than a chocolate. So with this in mind we tried one that leaned more towards chocolate, Kerrygold Irish Cream.
Kerrygold is the brand name used by a consortium of Irish dairies. Prior to 2015 their international brand was limited to cream and butter, but last year they expanded into Irish cream. Generally they are seen as a good tasting liqueur, and unlike many other brands they use a bit more chocolate, so it is much more pronounced in Kerrygold than it is in others.
The Taste Test
We took a bottle of our homemade hooch, as well as the competitor, Kerrygold, and poured small cups of each, and then let coworkers, spouses and any random person we could find have a taste. And, to quote the title of most Buzzfeed articles, the results were shocking!
Okay, the results weren't that shocking. In truth we kind of expected them.
Between the DIY and the off the shelf Irish cream, the off the shelf variety won 100% of the time.
Some of the quotes we heard from those who tried the Kerrygold included "smooth", "tasty", "delicious".
In contrast, the DIY stuff resulted in quotes like, "yuck" and "eww".
Eventually, everyone pretty much agreed that the homemade Irish cream was a bad idea. And it really does taste horrible. It was sweet, chocolatey and whiskey-ish. But there was little consistency: none of the ingredients seemed to work together; instead they were all just there. And together they didn't work.
And, to top it off, despite the fact that we blended the hell out of it (at least a minute on liquefy), and refrigerated it, the next day the cream had curdled.
We've heard that the off the shelf Irish creams use some sort of process to prevent this from happening, but of course each keeps it a secret. Whatever they do gives it a silky texture, keeps the cream from turning to cottage cheese, and also really combines the ingredients so they're not fighting each other.
The bottom line is for Saint Patrick's Day, if you want some Irish cream to help you celebrate, don't be tempted into making the junk we made, shell out the same amount you'd pay for the whiskey (or less, depending on the brand), and buy something made by the experts!