Scotch Cynar Maple Coffee Eggnog

Also, how cocktails are like...hamburgers?

When it’s cold, drink Scotch whisky.

Drink it in Manhattan-style drinks, as a Rob Roy or a Bobby Burns. Drink it Old Fashioneds, with a little bit of bitters and honey. You can even drink it in Scotchified Boulevardiers. (We’ll get to that eventually.)

But for now, consider drinking Scotch in a single-serve eggnog.

Specifically, a single-serve Scotch eggnog with Cynar, maple syrup, coffee beans, and a hint of salt.

This week’s drink is an iteration on last week’s single-serve eggnog template, and it demonstrates how you can expand and layer flavors within the format, elevating a basic ‘nog beyond its essential booze-egg-cream-sugar form. Instead of simply combining rum/whisk(e)/brandy with dairy and sweetener, it cuts the booze portion with earthy, rich Cynar, swaps out the sugar for maple syrup, and adds a layer of coffee flavor to the mix through the surprisingly easy technique of shaking everything with coffee beans.

This is an eggnog that will appeal to people who like Manhattans, Boulevardiers, cheap-but-delicious Scotch, and coffee-flavored cocktails of all types.

Also, Cynar, because—and I can never emphasize this enough—you really should put it in everything.

Shake Shack

Even in this age of cocktail demystification, I still run into people who think of cocktails as mysterious, almost mystical, creations, rather than rules and systems-bound structures.

So sometimes, when attempting to explain how cocktails work, I analogize them to hamburgers. Everyone understands what a hamburger is: The core structure is just a bun with a beef patty.

Nearly everyone also understands that you can take that core template and make a lot of different modifications and additions. In most cases, there’s also cheese; you can think of this as the primary accent. Lettuce, tomato, onions, pickles, and so on are also pretty common, and they function a little like garnish. You can add mushrooms, bacon, onions, or even jam for a more complex bite. You can also swap out the “base” ingredient, the beef patty, for something like fried chicken or fish. Switch out the bun for the right type of bread and replace the hamburger with roast beef and you’ve got a pastrami on rye. Iterate your way through swaps and substitutions and additions and you might end up with something like a BLT—obviously not a hamburger, but in some deep sense, basically the same idea as a hamburger.

The same is true for cocktails and even for distinctive cocktail structures, like eggnog.

So let’s go back to last week’s basic single-serve eggnog structure and then look at the way in which it morphs into this week’s more complex drink: