End Your Meal Right This Fall With A Coffee-And-Smoke Cocktail

The end of a meal seems to carry less excitement than its beginning these days; it's more often signaled by an airborne check request than a round of desserts, let alone digestif cocktails. However, for some, this dose of sugar is the only way to close a meal. As Alexandre Dumas put it in his Grand dictionnaire de Cuisine (1873), "after normal hunger has been satisfied...a final tempting of his sensuality."

At Hillside Supper Club, located on a quiet corner in San Francisco's Bernal Heights, it is hard not to be tempted by the offering scrawled in chalk above the kitchen, promising the unlikely pairing of smoke and coffee with cream sherry. Utilizing only low-ABV wine and beer, the Gomez cocktail blends a simple syrup — smoked in a pan over burning applewood chips — with brewed coffee. Lemon brings the right amount of bitterness and sour notes to complement the sherry's richness.

While sherry might once have been the perfect choice for one's grandmother after dinner, thankfully, for this drink Hillside rightfully employs the high-quality Alvear Solera cream sherry, a nutty oloroso sweetened with ripe Pedro Ximénez. As with other coffee cocktails, there's a spritely kick from the caffeine, but despite that similarity, it's hard to pin down a lineage for this cocktail. It's simply a flavor-driven approach to forging a drink, and one I would be happy to sip any crisp fall night. Enjoy.