Screaming Orgasm

Novice

The Screaming Orgasm is vodka, amaretto, coffee liqueur and Irish cream, shaken and served over ice. It is a dessert, it is from the 1980s, and the name was the marketing. The plain Orgasm is the same drink without the vodka: three liqueurs, no spirit. Adding the vodka is what makes it screaming, which is the sort of joke the bar-call era ran on. A great many drinks from that decade were named to make ordering them slightly awkward, and the awkwardness was the selling point. Underneath the name it is competently built. Amaretto brings almond, coffee liqueur brings roast and bitterness, Irish cream brings body and sweetness, and the vodka stiffens the whole thing without adding a flavour that would have to be accommodated. It is the White Russian's logic with two more bottles in it, and if you can get past ordering it out loud it is a genuinely good after-dinner drink.

ShakenAfter-DinnerPartyLate Night

Glassware: Rocks Glass

Garnish: None: the name did the garnishing

Ingredients

Serves

Vodka

25ml

The screaming. It adds strength without adding a flavour that would need accommodating between the almond, the coffee and the cream. Without it the same drink is a plain Orgasm.

Amaretto

12.5ml

A quarter of the drink, so kernel character matters. The cheap bottles are sugar and almond flavouring, and against coffee and cream they read as sweetness and nothing else.

Coffee Liqueur

12.5ml

The roast floor everything else sits on, and the only bitterness in the glass. It is what stops three sweet ingredients stacking into something you cannot finish.

Irish Cream

12.5ml

Body and sweetness, shaken through rather than floated. This is the one drink in its family where the cream liqueur integrates instead of forming a layer.

Instructions

Add the vodka, amaretto, coffee liqueur and Irish cream to a shaker.

Fill with cubed ice and shake hard for 10 seconds.

Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice.

Expert Tip

Shake it, do not layer it. This family integrates where the B-52 stratifies, and the texture you want is a uniform velvet rather than visible bands. Ten seconds is enough: cream liqueurs aerate quickly and over-shaking makes them frothy rather than silky. Buy amaretto with real kernel character. It is a quarter of the drink, and the cheap bottles are sugar and almond flavouring, which against coffee and cream reads as sweetness and nothing else. Serve it properly cold and over fresh ice rather than the ice it was shaken with, which is already half water. Cream liqueurs turn cloying as they warm, and a rocks glass filled fresh keeps it drinkable to the bottom.

Flavour Profile

CoffeeAlmondCreamSweetRich

Where It Comes From

The Orgasm family multiplied through the bar-call boom of the 1980s and no individual is credited with any of it. The plain version is three liqueurs; adding vodka makes it screaming; there are further variants that add more and are named accordingly.

What is worth understanding is why so many drinks from that decade have names like this. Bars were selling drinks by the theatre of ordering them, in rooms loud enough that a name had to carry across a counter, and mild embarrassment turned out to be excellent marketing. The Slow Comfortable Screw and its relatives come from exactly the same commercial impulse and the same few years.

The Cream Arithmetic

Four bottles, three of them sweet, and it works because each does a different job.

Coffee liqueur is the floor. It brings roast bitterness, which is the only thing in the glass counteracting the sugar, and its darkness gives the others something to sit against. Amaretto brings almond, which has a faint bitterness of its own from the apricot kernels it is made from. Irish cream brings the body and the texture. Vodka brings strength and nothing else.

Take any one of them out and it stops balancing. Without the coffee it is cloying. Without the amaretto it is a White Russian with cream. Without the vodka it is fine and a good deal weaker, which is precisely the plain Orgasm.

Shaken, Not Layered

The obvious comparison is the B-52, which also uses coffee liqueur and Irish cream and layers them into visible bands.

This does the opposite deliberately. Layering depends on density differences and produces a drink that changes as you go down it. Shaking produces a single texture, which is what a cream drink served over ice needs: a layered drink over ice would collapse into a mess within a minute.

Ten seconds of shaking is enough. Cream liqueurs aerate fast, and a long shake turns silk into foam.

The Eighties, Honestly

It is easy to be sniffy about this decade of drinks and the sniffiness is mostly misplaced. The names were daft and commercial, but the recipes underneath a good number of them are sound: they use real liqueurs in sensible proportions and they were built to be made quickly and to taste the same every time.

What went wrong later was the ingredients rather than the specifications. Cheap flavoured syrups replaced liqueurs, and the drinks that had survived on quality bottles stopped surviving. Made with decent amaretto and a real coffee liqueur, this one holds up.

How to Serve It

Shaken for ten seconds, strained over fresh ice in a rocks glass rather than the ice it was shaken with.

After dinner and instead of pudding. It also exists as a shot down the rail, which is the same specification at a third of the volume and considerably less pleasant to drink.

The Spirit

Vodka

The only major spirit whose legal definition asks for character to be taken away rather than built. UK law requires it to be distilled so that the raw material's own qualities are selectively reduced, and sets the floor at 37.5%. What is left is strength, texture, and whatever survived the process.

Learn more

Frequently Asked Questions

What is in a Screaming Orgasm?

Vodka, amaretto, coffee liqueur and Irish cream, shaken with ice and strained over fresh ice. The vodka is the screaming part: the same drink without it is a plain Orgasm, and it comes from the bar-call era of the 1980s.

What is a plain Orgasm?

The same three liqueurs without the vodka: amaretto, coffee liqueur and Irish cream. It is gentler, noticeably sweeter for having no neutral spirit diluting it, and it was the original of the two. The vodka version came later and took over.

Should it be layered like a B-52?

No. The B-52 layers by density and is served in a shot glass; this is shaken to a uniform velvet and served over ice, where layers would collapse within a minute anyway. Shaking is the design rather than a shortcut.

Does the amaretto brand matter?

It is a quarter of the drink, so yes. An amaretto with real kernel character brings a faint bitterness that works against the coffee. The cheap bottles are sugar and almond flavouring and add nothing but sweetness.

Master the Techniques

How to Shake a Cocktail Like a Pro

White Russian

The White Russian is the Black Russian’s creamier child, appearing in print by 1965 as the era’s dinner-party update of the Brussels original: vodka, coffee liqueur and a float of cream, with dessert and nightcap negotiating in one rocks glass. It spent the health-conscious decades in exile, remembered as a period piece. Then 1998 happened. The Big Lebowski gave the drink to the Dude, who mixes White Russians with whatever is to hand throughout the film, and the cocktail became a cult object: ordered in his honour nightly ever since, half-ironically at first and then simply because it is very good. Built properly it justifies the devotion. The cream is floated rather than stirred, so the drink starts black and finishes white, marbling as it goes. It is the gentlest landing the coffee-vodka family offers, and the right call when an evening wants something that behaves like a dessert without quite being one.

B-52

The B-52 is the layered shot with a service record: coffee liqueur, Irish cream and orange liqueur in three precise strata. The credit most often goes to Peter Fich at the Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta in the late 1970s, who named his drinks after bands he liked. The band had named itself for the beehive hairdo, the hairdo was named for the bomber, and the shot inherited the whole chain. The layers are density made visible. Coffee liqueur carries the most sugar and sinks to the base, Irish cream rides the middle, and the orange liqueur, lightest and driest, crowns the stack. Poured carefully over the back of a spoon each stratum sits distinct, and the whole thing goes down in one swallow that arrives in three acts. It became the definitive layered shooter of the 1980s and the test piece every bartender learns the spoon on, which is still the most useful thing about it.

Shaft

The Shaft is Canada’s iced-coffee ritual, and it arrives with a civic dispute attached. Vodka, coffee liqueur and Irish cream over cold espresso and ice, drunk through a straw as fast as the drinker can manage, with Victoria and Calgary both claiming the invention and Victoria holding the competitions. The build is the White Russian’s arithmetic served cold and sharpened. Three fifteen-millilitre pours of spirit, roast and cream over forty-five of genuine chilled espresso, and that last ingredient is what separates this from the sweet coffee-flavoured drinks it superficially resembles. Real coffee brings acidity and bitterness the liqueur cannot, and the drink needs both to stay upright. The straw is not a garnish. Drunk in one continuous pull the whole thing arrives at once, cold and bitter and creamy in the same second, which is the entire point of it. Sipped slowly it is a pleasant iced coffee. Raced, it is a Shaft.