This is a long pour of vodka and coffee liqueur over ice, laced with a slow float of fresh cream that softens it into something dessert-like and easy. It drinks like a gentler Black Russian, the cream drifting down through the dark liquor in pale ribbons and rounding off the coffee's roast and sweetness until a slow stir turns the glass the colour of milky coffee.
Built · Rocks · On the Rocks
build
Fill a rocks (old fashioned) glass with ice cubes.
add
Pour the vodka and coffee liqueur over the ice.
top
Float the fresh cream on top.
stir
Stir slowly to lace the cream through the drink.
No one is credited with inventing the White Russian; it grew out of the Black Russian, a vodka-and-coffee-liqueur drink reputedly first mixed by bartender Gustave Tops at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels in 1949. Cream and a new name were added during the 1960s, and the drink had reached print by 1965, when it appeared in the Oakland Tribune. It sat on the IBA's official lists of 1987 and 1993 before being dropped, though it lived on for years as a quiet after-dinner habit. Its cult fame came later, on screen, as the constant companion of The Dude in The Big Lebowski.