5 Coffee Liqueurs You Should Leave On The Shelf

Coffee and alcohol have long been bedfellows. From 17th century Spain to the modern day, caffeinated booze has long been a fan favorite. The combination of alcohol and coffee shows up in a multitude of forms; everything from just pouring a spirit into your cup of joe to decadent and fancy cocktails like a Winter Woods Espresso Martini. Coffee liqueur is one of the more popular avenues to get your booze and caffeine fix in the modern day. A good coffee liqueur should be strong in both coffee flavor, and in Alcohol By Volume (ABV), but not so strong as to overwhelm your senses. As with all things, a good product will strike the right balance.

As we delve deeper into the winter season, the call for cozy coffee cocktails will naturally start to increase. This will be due to wanting a warmer cocktail during the colder months, or simply because the upcoming holidays will have you serving more drinks overall. With so many brands, products, and labels to choose from it's important to make sure you know which brand will bring the buzz, and which are simply a buzzkill. Thankfully, there are communities online that will help steer you in the right direction and avoid a holiday faux pas. The following are the worst of the worst coffee liqueurs, as decided by reviewers, that you should avoid serving to your guests -– or making for yourself.

Tia Maria is a modern, hip brand. It uses neon signs and jazzy fonts to really make itself stand out from the crowd of other liqueurs and spirits on the shelf. It advertises a "patented roasting method" and touts that it is 100% vegan. How you could have a non-vegan coffee liqueur –- without it becoming a cream liqueur –- is beyond me, but it certainly is a good buzzword for advertising purposes. Tia Maria absolutely has a fantastic marketing team. Look no further than the "About us" section on its website. It is not labeled "About us," it is labeled 'we are coffee'. Unfortunately the product speaks louder than the font choices with this one.

According to the general public Tia Maria's Cold Brew Coffee Liqueur is fine in a mixed drink or a cocktail. Something that the brand acknowledges as well. It claims to be "made for" an Espresso Martini. Considering the multitudes of reviews discussing how overly sweet Tia Maria's Cold Brew Coffee Liqueur is on its own, that's probably true. Coffee is not a sweet beverage. However, over-sweetening the liqueur doesn't add to the experience of a coffee liqueur — it can come across as the brand apologizing for the bitterness of the drink. If you don't intend to drink it neat, Tia Maria's sounds good for strong and sweet cocktails, but it is more a coffee syrup liqueur than a coffee liqueur at that point. You can skip this one if you're on the fence about trying it.

Kahlúa is one of those brands that has become synonymous with a specific type of product. In this instance, Kahlúa is far and away considered the standard for coffee liqueurs. An issue with becoming a brand that is so recognizable is that you will have detractors — many detractors. The more in the public eye you are, the more you open yourself up to criticism. Pair that with a brand's underlying desire to be generally liked by everyone (instead of catering to one specific taste and perfecting it), and you get a liqueur that everyone tolerates, but no one loves.

Kahlúa pops up in review threads on websites like Reddit semi-frequently. Instead of asking for Kahlúa recommendations, however, individuals are looking for a Kahlúa alternative. Whether Kahlúa is too popular or simply not their preference, even the professionals who put their two cents in on Kahlúa agree it's just too sweet to be consumed neat. This was best put by Chris Carlsson of Spirits Review, who noted that it's everywhere, but not necessarily the best. Everything from the sweetness to the syrupy texture makes it seem like Kahlúa is meant just for mixing and not for drinking neat. It seems everyone agrees it's an excellent mix for their favorite coffee cocktail — If that's the case, Kahlúa needs to shift to a drink mix branding, rather than a coffee liqueur.

When reading reviews online there are a few key factors you want to account for. Not only do you read the written word, you also check the general trend of a product. It's all well and good to know there's a vocal minority, but if they cannot agree on specific issues with a product you can chalk that up to individual tastes. What should ring alarm bells is a review section filled with barely passing review scores, and little-to-no comments. People aren't even passionate in their dislike of that product — Sabroso Coffee Liqueur is blah.

Sabroso on the surface seems like a straightforward Mexican coffee liqueur. In fact, sabroso in Spanish means "tasty." You would hope that a brand named tasty would be able to follow through with the flavor. Judging from the reviews, however, it's painfully bland; and possibly artificial. With most reviews hovering just above the 50% satisfaction mark, and very little being said in the comments. The only person who spoke up on the Total Wine website about Sabroso made sure to mention the total lack of real coffee anywhere on the labeling. If that's the case this should be more accurately described as a coffee flavored liqueur and not a coffee liqueur as a whole. Using a low quality coffee –- or coffee liqueurs –- is the number one mistake people make with coffee cocktails. It's easily avoided in this instance by giving a hard pass to Sabroso.

Even the most positively reviewed products can have a few issues with individual bottles or packages. A single bottle of corked wine is not indicative of the entire brand, for example. Perhaps there was a bubble of unaccounted for gas, or that bottle happened to be at the top of the shipping pallet that sat in the sun for just long enough to do damage — these things happen. However, when all the negative reviews for a generally well-liked product say the same thing, it's important to pay attention. That is what is happening with Kamora Coffee Liqueur — a well-received sweet coffee liqueur that easily scores just under 80% satisfaction on most rating websites.

While a 20% ABV does not seem like it would be overly strong for a liqueur, for a certain palette, the balance is not there. One commenter waxed poetic about its "nasty" flavor, while another pointed out that it smelled and tasted more of rubbing alcohol than coffee liqueur. This can sometimes happen if you don't store a coffee liqueur properly, but it's more likely when you attempt to make your own coffee liqueur at home. It seems that Kamora isn't quite walking that line of flavor-to-alcohol as well as it may want. Unless you're interested in a drink so stiff it could get up and walk away, search elsewhere for your caffeinated liqueur.

Cafe Granita has a very nice look to its bottle. The white and blue label with red lettering, and the bronze and gold logo is very fetching. That is, sadly, where the upside to this coffee liqueur ends. If you have the choice between Cafe Granita and learning how to brew your own kind of alcoholic coffee, you should choose to do the infusion yourself. This liqueur is so bad that the two days it may take you to properly soak, strain, and brew your own boozy coffee is preferable to the convenience of picking this up at the store.

One reviewer tactfully points out that Cafe Granita tastes like someone mixed simple syrup, instant coffee, and some vodka. Most of the one- to three-star reviews speak to Cafe Granita's mouthfeel: watery, thin, and unpleasant. A few of the reviewers make a note that, while it is unpleasant at the moment, it also has no staying power. Once you've finished the sip, it doesn't linger. This is one of the only liqueurs that has received a dreaded one star on Distiller.com — a truly difficult feat of failure to achieve. That alone should push you to find an alternative coffee liqueur, whether for drinking neat, or mixing into your martinis. Cafe Granita is not the right choice for any but the most coffee-oriented drinker; a thin, and bitter, shot to swallow.

People are passionate about their alcohol, as well as the additives that pair well with it. In researching this article, I focused on recent reviews — within the last year at the earliest. To find the best recommendations, I started on Reddit, which has a thriving cocktail community. The major roadblock I kept bumping into is that, unlike most other products, people don't complain about their liqueurs. If they don't like something, they often just won't buy it again. If determining which liqueur to buy gets a bit much you could always just pick up a canned coffee cocktail. Failing that, many of the recommendations I read suggested trying Mr. Black's coffee liqueur. Reddit is absolutely over the moon for it, and I couldn't find any consistent complaints about the product. In fact, a lot of the information I gleaned from Reddit was passing recommendations on brands to buy rather than avoid. I turned my attention to reviewing aggregate hubs like TheDailyPour and Drinkhacker.

From those two websites, I was able to locate two places that I used to present this list to you. Distiller.com and Total Wine were two of the public opinion forums that I pulled from for this article. Distiller is a reviewing platform for all things alcohol with a robust search function and a large library of liquor. Total Wine is a retailer — not a review site — but it has one of the most active comments and review sections I've ever seen. Between the two, I was able to compile this list of liqueurs to avoid.