What is your favorite liquor to sip on after dinner? For many people in the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia, the answer to this question is a drink called “licor cafe”, the region’s “black gold.”
Coffee liquor is something that most of us are probably familiar with, but the little-known Galician version of this beverage is truly something to behold. Starting off with aguardiente de orujo, a local liquor made from the resulting skins and stems leftover after grapes are pressed to make wine.
This base, which gives licor cafe its high 30-40% alcohol content, is then combined with several local favorites to make the final product. Large amounts of coffee beans, along with a simple syrup, cinnamon sticks, lemon and orange peels, and occasionally vanilla beans, are left to steep in the aguardiente de orujo for several weeks.
Those ingredients are then filtered out, and the result is a dark brown, almost black, liquid which is sweet and tastes of strong coffee and clean, white alcohol.
Most Galicians sip this beverage in a short, wide glass with ice and use it as an after-dinner aperitif. Doesn’t that sound delicious?
