Pharisäer

The Pharisäer is a hot coffee drink from North Frisia, on Germany’s North Sea coast in Schleswig-Holstein. A strong black coffee is sweetened with sugar, laced with brown rum and topped with a thick cap of whipped cream. It is especially associated with Nordstrand, a former island now joined to the mainland by a causeway, but you’ll find it in cafés and restaurants all along the coast.

The cream is not just decoration. According to the drink’s legend, it was there to hide the smell of the rum, and it is still part of the ritual: you don’t stir, you don’t use a spoon or straw, you sip the hot, sweet, boozy coffee through the cold cream. Local custom says that if you stir, you buy the next round.

It tastes warming and rich, with molasses and spice from the rum and a sweet, creamy finish – a classic after a windy walk on the dykes. Its name refers to the biblical Pharisees, long used in German as a byword for hypocrites; some writers point out that this usage draws on old anti-Jewish stereotypes.

The Pharisäer’s origin is a local legend rather than documented history. The story usually told on Nordstrand sets it at a christening in the 19th century – some versions give 1872 and name the host as a farmer, Peter Georg Johannsen. The pastor, a teetotaller sometimes named as Bleyer, disapproved of alcohol, so the hosts secretly spiked the guests’ coffee with rum and covered it with whipped cream to hide the smell, while the pastor got plain coffee. When the guests grew merrier and he was handed the wrong cup, he is said to have exclaimed “Oh, ihr Pharisäer!” (“Oh, you Pharisees!” – you hypocrites), and the name stuck.

Whatever its true beginnings, the drink became the unofficial national drink of Nordstrand and a fixture of cafés along Schleswig-Holstein’s west coast, part of a Frisian tradition of rum-laced hot drinks that also includes the Tote Tante. It even reached a courtroom: in 1981 a Flensburg court dealt with a customer who refused to pay for a Pharisäer, and the case is often summarised as ruling that one with less than about 4 cl of rum isn’t the real thing.