Episode 128

Featured Cocktail: The Hot Ale Flip

This episode’s featured cocktail is the Hot Ale Flip – in honor of Chris’s beer background, we thought this might be a nice, holiday appropriate and historical recipe.

The hot ale flip comes from a time before cocktails. In fact, it’s one of several proto-cocktails where bartenders – or more accurately tavern owners and bar maids – would play around with combining various ingredients to make some sort of concoction that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Tossing & Red Hot Pokers

There were two drink-making techniques that were popularized during this time. One involved taking a red hot poker or firebrand and submerging it in your beverage to bring it up to a simmering temperature. This served the purpose of both warming the drink and probably killed anything nasty that might have been lurking there in the pre-refrigeration age.

The other relevant technique we need to mention before I give you the recipe is “tossing” a drink. This was the room temperature precursor to shaking or stirring a drink over ice. And it simply entailed pouring the drink from one container to another until the contents were all mixed. It also added quite a bit of air to the equation, which often resulted in a frothy head.

So, now that we know these two techniques, let’s make our hot ale flip. The ingredients you’ll need to make it are:

• 8 oz of dark ale (like a porter or a stout)

• 1.5 oz of dark rum or brandy

• 1.5 oz of a brown sugar syrup (like a simple syrup, but using brown sugar)

• One whole egg

In a heat-safe container, whisk together the spirits, brown sugar syrup, and the egg. Then, heat the ale in a sauce pan until it’s steaming hot, but not quite simmering – this would be our modern day equivalent of the red hot poker. You’ll want to add the hot beer very gradually to the mixture, whisking the entire time, so as to avoid cooking that egg. In other words, raise the temperature gradually. Then, you’ll want to “toss” the drink, as described above, between two vessels before then pouring it into a heat safe mug and garnishing with some nice freshly grated nutmeg.

Even if this sounds complicated to make, it’s a very hearty, satisfying cocktail. When the days grow dark, so does the beer, and what better way to dress up your porters and stouts for the holidays than by dazzling your guests with a round of hot ale flips?