For Christmas, Hot Butter Your Cocktails

Make a Hot Buttered Monte Carlo or a Hot Buttered Vieux Carré.

Christmas this year is expected to be especially chilly in much of the United States, which makes it a great time for warm cocktails. From basic mulled wine to hot toddies, there are plenty of warm drinks in circulation, and many of them are quite satisfying, especially if served piping hot on a cold night. When the temperatures dip below freezing, warm booze in a hot mug is always a delight. 

But what if you want something a little more complex? Something a little more like a classic cocktail that still hits all the pleasure centers of a more basic warm drink? 

That’s where hot buttered cocktails come in. 

You may have heard of hot buttered rum, which is exactly what it sounds like: rum plus butter or a butter batter, topped with warm water. 

In recent years, however, cocktail nerds all over the internet have taken to serving “hot buttered anything.” For example, my friend Jacob Grier — who is the co-author of the fantastic new cocktail book Raising the Bar, and who first introduced me to hot-buttered booze long ago — likes to make Hot Buttered Chartreuse, a warmed-up herbal-sweet-fat concoction that that’s as indulgent as it is delicious. 

I wanted to try to take this hot buttered anything step a further: If you can hot butter rum and hot butter Chartreuese, why can’t you hot butter entire cocktails? 

After all, a hot buttered drink is just booze, batter, and hot water. So there’s no reason you can’t use a traditional cocktail combination in the alcohol slot. 

As it turns out, this works really, really well. Better, honestly, than I expected. It’s also fast and easy to make, and it doesn’t rely on hard-to-find ingredients. Plus, you can batch the batter that serves as the foundation of this drink, leave it in the refrigerator throughout the holidays, then have it ready whenever you want it. 

But there are a few tricks to getting it right. 

First, you have to whip up a sugar-spice-butter batter, which only takes a few minutes, but does need to be made with some thought. 

Second, you have to actually measure your ingredients — including the batter and the hot water, even though many recipes don’t specify measurements for those elements. 

Finally, it helps to pick the right sort of cocktail to make in this format. Although many cocktails work well in hot buttered form, virtually all of the best results in my tests were stirred-and-boozy drinks that involved some sort of herbal or bitter liqueur. 

In particular, stirred-and-boozy drinks with Bénédictine tended to perform better than others. So this Christmas, let’s make a Hot Buttered Monte Carlo and a Hot Buttered Vieux Carré. These are great, herbal, boozy, cold weather cocktails that work exceptionally well in the hot buttered format. 

It’s Getting Hott (Buttered) In Here, So… 

Let’s start with the batter. 

As with all such concoctions, you will find many recipes online, made using many different techniques. Many of them will be good. This is a somewhat forgiving recipe format. 

At heart, hot buttered batter is just butter, sugar or some sort of sweetener, and spices — and perhaps a bit of salt. If you’re familiar with Samin Nosrat’s excellent introduction to the genberal theory of cooking, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, the batter is just the first two of those. And then later, of course, you’ll add heat. 

Some people make their batter on the stovetop, but I find it’s quicker and easier to just whip it up in the bowl after softening the butter. I use a microwave on low power to soften the butter, because I’m basically a polar bear and I tend to keep the house quite cool during the winter. But  depending on how warm you keep your house, you may be able to leave the butter out on the counter. However you do it, the goal should be to have butter that is soft enough to spread, but not so melty it’s turned into liquid. (Please, for the love of Jerry Thomas, use real butter, not margarine or Crisco.) 

Like I said, I was first introduced to the concept of hot buttered booze by friend and fellow Substack writer Jacob Grier. Grier uses a recipe by Lance Mayhew, which I’ve adapted and updated below. 

Most notably, I’ve included Lyle’s Golden Syrup. That’s partly because, as you may have seen in last week’s newsletter, I have a whole lot of it. And it’s partly because, as in the Old Fashioneds we made last week, Lyle’s gives this even more of a Christmas cookie-like taste and texture.

Hot Buttered Cocktail Batter

• 2 sticks soft butter (microwaved at low power or counter-rested)

• 1 ½ cups demerara sugar

• ⅔  cup Lyle’s Golden Syrup 

• 1 tsp ground cinnamon

• 1 tsp fresh grated nutmeg

• ½ tsp ground allspice

• ⅛ tsp ground clove

• ⅛ tsp ground mace 

• ½ tsp salt 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Using a microwave on low power, soften butter until it is easily sliced but not melting into liquid. 

2. In a mixing bowl, add sugar to butter, then spices, stirring and mixing with a fork or wooden spoon. 

3. Continue to stir and mix until thoroughly integrated into a consistent batter, with any spoonful having about the same sugar/spice/butter consistency as any other. If there are obvious glops of butter without much sugar or spice, you need to continue mixing . 

4. Once your mix is complete, transfer batter to a tupperware container, then store in the refrigerator. Should last for at least two weeks. 

Once you’ve made your batter, I strongly recommend tasting it. It’s really quite rich, so you don’t need a bunch: Just a tiny spoonful — or, if you’re so inclined, a well-coated finger — will do. It tastes something like raw cookie dough, but without the flour or raw eggs. And in some ways, that’s what Hot Buttering your cocktails does to them — you’re making them warmer, sweeter, fattier, and more cookie like. 

The Butter Batter Book 

Now that you have the batter, you can make all sorts of hot buttered cocktails. 

This is quite straightforward. You’re just mixing batter, hot water, and the cocktail base in a pre-warmed mug. 

But first you have to decide what cocktail to make. 

In my experience, best base cocktails for this format are drinks that consist entirely of liquor and bitters, are richer and fuller flavored, and have some sort of spiced, aromatic, or bitter component. That includes anything from the Manhattan to the Boulevardier to the Negroni. You could even try something really strange, like a hot buttered version of the Midnight Marauder — a Mezcal Negroni riff with Bonal. I would probably skip the Hot Buttered Martinis and Daiquiris myself, but if someone wants to make the case for those versions, I am certainly open to being persuaded. 

Like I said up top, however, my favorite drinks in this format all involved Bénédictine, an herbal sweet liqueur that is a key component in a number of classic and modern cocktails. Like Chartreuse, Bénédictine works exceptionally well with the sugar-fat-spice mix of hot buttered batter. 

We looked at two classic cocktails that rely on Bénédictine this year: The first was the Monte Carlo, a should-be-better-known riff on the Old Fashioned that uses Bénédictine in place of sugar syrup. The second was the Vieux Carré — a Manhattan-like drink that splits the base ingredient between cognac and rye and then adds an herbal kick thanks to the addition of Bénédictine and Peychaud’s bitters. The hot buttered versions of both are boozy, warming, and earthy. They’re almost like drinking ultra-rich, ultra flavorful mugs of hot tea. 

Like I said, prep is pretty straightforward — you just mix some batter, booze, and hot water together. Frankly, even loose and lazy preparations work pretty well. But there are a few guidelines to abide by for a superior experience:

• First, measure your batter. Being ultra precise is hard with a thick batter like this, but a lot of recipes call for a “spoonful” or a “dollop”... which leaves a lot of room for variation. I’ve found that the ideal proportion is just a little bit more than one measured tablespoon — call it a “fat” tablespoon. (Not a teaspoon!)

  

• Second, measure your hot water. Again, many recipes for hot buttered booze just say “top with warm water.” Depending on the size of your mug and the length of your pour, you might end up with two ounces…or nine. In this drink, the hot water serves the dilution function that shaking or stirring with ice serves in cold cocktails. So you really don’t want to overpour and leave yourself with a flabby, over-diluted cocktail. At the same time, you want enough hot water to ensure a pleasingly hot drink. 

• Speaking of pleasingly hot: Make sure to pre-warm your mugs by filling them with hot water before serving. This will heat the mugs in advance, producing a drink that not only stays hotter for longer, but that is warm and toasty when someone reaches for it. Have you seen how cold it’s going to be this weekend? You really don’t want to promise someone a hot drink, then hand them a room-temperature mug. 

• Hot drinks like this work best with robust flavors. So when possible, err on the side of big, bold ingredients. For example, in the Vieux Carré, you should try to use a more aggressive sweet vermouth, like Carpano Antica Formula, rather than something thinner and more delicate, like Dolin Rouge. Similarly, in both of these drinks, you are probably better off with a fairly rambunctious whiskey like Wild Turkey 101 rye (and do make sure to use the rye, not the 101 bourbon) rather than something subtler, like Old Overholt or Sazerac rye. 

• Finally, don’t skip out on the garnish! This is a cocktail — not just warmed-up butter booze. Just as an orange peel twisted over top of a cocktail leaves a layer of orange-y aromas that change the nose of the drink, an orange peel twisted over the top of this cocktail makes a subtle yet significant difference. The drink doesn’t fail without a garnish, so don’t feel like you can’t make this if you’re out of oranges. But if you have an orange around, or can acquire one, it’s very much worth taking the extra few seconds to peel off a big strip, then squeeze it over the drink to release the oils. 

Hot Buttered Vieux Carré 

• 1 fat tablespoon hot buttered cocktail batter

• 2 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters

• 2 dashes Angostura Aromatic Bitters

• 1 teaspoon Bénédictine

• 1 ounce sweet vermouth (Carpano Antica Formula)

• 1 ounce cognac (Pierre Ferrand 1840) 

• 1 ounce rye whiskey (Wild Turkey 101 rye)

• 3 ounces hot water 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Fill a saucepan or electric kettle with water, then heat until boiling.

2. Once water has begun to boil, fill mug with hot water. Wait until mug is warm to the touch on the outside, about 30 seconds to a minute. 

3. Dump hot water from mug. Now you should have an empty mug that is hot to the touch. 

4. In the pre-warmed mug, combine all ingredients — batter, bitters, booze, measured hot water — and stir until fully integrated, about 10 seconds. There should be no chunks of batter remaining in the mix.  

5. Using a vegetable peeler, cut a large swath of orange peel, then twist over the top of the drink to release the oils. Drop orange peel into drink, or display on a cocktail pick. 

Hot Buttered Monte Carlo 

• 1 fat tablespoon hot buttered cocktail batter

• 2 dashes Angostura Aromatic Bitters

• ½ ounce Bénédictine

• 2 ounces rye (Wild Turkey 101 rye)

• 3 ounces hot water 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Fill a saucepan or electric kettle with water, then heat until boiling.

2. Once water has begun to boil, fill your mug with hot water. Wait until mug is warm to the touch on the outside, about 30 seconds to a minute. 

3. Dump hot water from mug. Now you should have an empty mug that is hot to the touch. 

4. In the pre-warmed mug, combine all ingredients — batter, bitters, booze, measured hot water — and stir until fully integrated, about 10 seconds. There should be no chunks of batter remaining in the mix.  

5. Using a vegetable peeler, cut a large swath of orange peel, then twist over the top of the drink to release the oils. Drop orange peel into drink, or display on a cocktail pick. 

The Large Dogs of Christmas