Drink a Coffee Cocktail, Find Bliss, Repeat

There's the cowboy method of making a coffee cocktail. You know, sloshing a slug of whiskey from a flask into a tin mug of watery, mostly burned, gritty grounds. Horse, hat, and Red Dead Redemption attitude not required. There's the pregame method, too: Brewing a fresh pot after work and adding it to a thermos with whatever alcohol you have stocked on the bar cart (Jameson Cold Brew, if you're lucky), then nursing it in the taxi or on the train to your final destination. There's also the cop-out method, which is sipping one of the handful of esteemed coffee liqueurs that've been introduced to the spirits world over the last decade—Mr. Black and Patrón XO Cafe come to mind—over ice.

Or Kahlúa. There's always Kahlúa, though it barely has enough caffeine to rile up a puppy.

But should you want to go legit with your alcoholic coffee cocktail consumption, here's a selection of classic drinks that'll work. A few call for brewed coffee, the others for coffee liqueurs, Kahlúa being the most recognizable but not the only option. From there, it's up to you to balance the confounding coupling of caffeine and alcohol, upper and downer, in a way that leaves you buzzed without swan-diving into sleepiness.