Sombrero Cocktail

I tried this Kahlúa Sombrero Cocktail at a bar, loved rich coffee flavor and was wondering what is original recipe.

i know it uses Kahlúa coffee liqueur and cream. Is there something else? and what are exact amounts for perfect taste?

According to the Kahlua web site, the drink is 2 parts Kahlua to 3 parts milk.

“Perfect taste” with this sort of simple drink is probably a personal preference. Easy to experiment with by slightly varying the proportions and trying different milks. For that matter, you could also try more interesting liqueurs in place of Kahlua, such as Mr. Black or Varnelli Kaffe-Moka.

1 Like

Well, I found original recipe, with 2 ounces Kahlúa coffee liqueur and 2 ounces cream or milk.

As far as I can tell, the Sombrero–which was incidentally the first drink I ever mixed, back in, like, 1975, when I was well under age–goes back to New England, in 1968. It first appears in print, as far as I can tell, in the Boston Herald-Traveler that year (May 30, p. 22):


And yeah, originally it was made with not Kahlua, but rather that New England favorite, coffee brandy. At the time, the leading brand was Arrow (then made by Heublein, who also had Smirnoff vodka). Here’s what the folks at Arrow said about the drink in 1972 (Troy, NY Times-Record, September 30 1971, p. 18):

By then, the drink was usually made with the coffee liqueur and milk in equal proportions, although sometimes a splash of vodka was added. As the drink grew nationwide (it starts turing up outside of New England in 1972), Kahlua moved in and basically took it over, helped no doubt by being actually made in Mexico, where sombreros came from.

That’s probably more than anyone needs to know about this simple drink, but what the hell.

3 Likes

This was a favorite of mine when I could first pass for drinking age. But we just called it a “Kahlua and Cream.” (Or probably in my head it was more precisely a “Kahlua ‘n’ Cream.”)
Speaking of dodgy apostrophes, @Splificator does the apostrophe in your image imply anything—like for example the drink belonged to a bar called Sombrero or the like?

Occam’s Razor suggests it’s just the usual grammatical carelessness and tenuous gasp of English orthography.

Makes sense, thank’s.

1 Like