Wishing you a hot buttered holiday

For my last piece of the year, I wrote about the state of the craft distilling industry during the pandemic. There’s a common misperception that because retail alcohol sales are booming, it must be a great time to be in the spirits business. The reality is that many small distillers are experiencing a substantial drop in sales. Craft distillers rely on avenues of discovery such as tasting rooms, tourism, cocktail bars, and in-store tastings to get people to sample their wares. With so many of those opportunities closed off for much of 2020, consumers are sticking with familiar, established brands. On top of that, distillers have been caught up in the US-EU trade war, contending with substantial tariffs on inputs and finished products. For Inside Hook, I talked to a few distillers about the stark realities of trying to sell craft spirits during COVID.

As someone who went into this year working primarily in spirits and hospitality, 2020 has been a professional rollercoaster for me, too. I started the year with the news that my primary employer was pulling out of the US, my last planned work for them an event at SXSW that obviously never happened. I then lined up other work opportunities, only to lose those to the pandemic, too. Since the spring I’ve been working primarily as a freelance writer. In some ways this has just accelerated a transition I’d been wanting anyway, so I can’t complain too much. And that transition has been going surprisingly well: I got a book deal, built relationships with more publications, wrote my first cover story for Reason, and, like a million other journalists, started a Substack.

This is the 24th edition of the newsletter. These have been fun for me to write and I’m grateful to all of you for taking the time to read them. I expect the format to keep evolving and look forward to a time next year when the dual pestilences of COVID and Donald Trump will no longer feature so prominently in the text. If you have suggestions or requests for what to see here, please send them my way.

Since it’s Christmas Eve, I’m going to skip the usual reading recommendations and go straight to some holiday drinks. However, I did post a recap of my writing highlights of the year on Twitter, so recent subscribers might find something you missed over there.

Social distancing

In keeping with the winter beer cocktail theme of the previous newsletter, I’d planned to conclude this one with my Averna Stout Flip. Then Peter Suderman scooped me on my own dang drink. His latest cocktail newsletter, which arrived in my inbox last night, is all about flips. It’s got a bevy of interesting variations, including my own, so go check it out there. (And subscribe, while you’re at it!)

Instead, let’s talk about making things hot and buttered. Hot Buttered Rum is one of the classic holiday drinks, albeit one that’s often made poorly. Typical failings are relying on store-bought batters made with who knows what and using inferior spirits. Fortunately, it’s very easy to make your own batter, and you might have everything you need at home already. You can also adapt it to spirits other than rum, as we’ll see below with personal favorite way of making a hot and buttery cocktail.

I’ll confess I haven’t taken a deep dive into batter recipes, only because I started with this one from my friend Lance Mayhew and it’s so good that I’ve never felt a need to explore further. The basic elements are butter, sugar, and Christmas spices, and as long as you can roughly approximate this recipe you should be in good shape. (If you don’t have agave nectar, for example, maybe try honey or maple syrup.) Here’s Lance’s recipe:

• 1 stick butter, room temperature

• 3/4 cup brown sugar

• 1/4 cup agave nectar

• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

• 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

• 1/8 teaspoon allspice

• 1/8 teaspoon clove

• pinch salt

Stir all this together to thoroughly combine it. You’ll end up with a very sweet and aromatic batter that you can keep in the refrigerator indefinitely. When you’re ready to make a Hot Buttered Rum, all you have to do is scoop out a big spoonful of batter, dissolve it in a mug with hot water from a kettle, and add a slug of rum. As with all hot drinks, starting with a pre-warmed mug will help keep it hotter longer. And if you plan to make these throughout the night (or day as the case may be), just keep the batter out at room temperature.

For the rum, don’t just grab whatever dusty bottle happens to be lurking in your liquor cabinet. You don’t want a neutral rum that’s going to hide in the background. You want a rum with some oomph that’s going to positively add to the drink. Demerara rums from El Dorado are a great choice here, or you could do like I do and use an infinity bottle that combines these with accents of funkier spirits like Jamaican pot still rum, cachaça, and Batavia arrack. Try making your own personal blend. Whatever you do, make it with a rum that’s worth your time.

Why stop at rum, though? There’s no limit to what spirits you could combine with your batter. Years ago, at one bar I managed, we offered “Hot Buttered Anything,” where for a couple bucks extra we would serve any spirit we carried hot and buttered. Some worked and some didn’t, but the experimentation was a lot of fun.

The epiphany for me came with Hot Buttered Chartreuse. I love Chartreuse, and it’s wonderful in hot chocolate (try it!), so it seemed like a natural candidate for the hot and buttered treatment. The way its herbal notes combine with the spices in the batter is really fantastic. Hot Buttered Chartreuse has become a holiday tradition for me, actually displacing Hot Buttered Rum as my winter go-to.

(I’m happy to see that Hot Buttered Chartreuse has made its way afield to a few other places, too, showing up on menus now and then. My friend Pete featured it on his cocktail YouTube channel a couple days ago along with other hot buttered experiments, including Hot Buttered Fernet. Or if you’d prefer something closer to the ASMR genre, check out this extravagant video from Japan.)

To make it:

• 1 oz Chartreuse

• 1 dollop Hot Buttered Rum batter

• 6-7 ounces hot water

Dissolve the batter in hot water from the kettle in a warm mug. Add Chartreuse. Enjoy.

That’s it for this year. Thank you for reading, happy holidays, and I’ll see you in what I’m anticipating to be a much improved 2021.

A favor

If you enjoy this newsletter, whether you read it for the articles or just for the cocktails at the bottom, consider forwarding it on to someone you know who might like it, too.

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