Hot buttered rum? But why? Like egg nog, this is a wintry cocktail that has, despite its venerable history, slowly faded into ignominy. And that, frankly, is a disappointment.
Hot buttered rum has three things going for it that should make it a smash during the month of February:
- It’s hot. We love hot things. Hot chocolate. Hot fires. The cast of Game of Thrones. Heeeeeeey, Jon Snow.
- There’s butter. There’s basically nothing that butter can’t improve. Pretty sure Paula Deen based her entire career around this theory.
- Rum. Because it’s rum. You’re reading Top Shelf, so it’s safe to say I don’t even have to explain this one.
American colonists are largely responsible for the drink’s creation and initial popularity. After the capture of Jamaica by the British royal Navy in 1655, rum began finding its way onto ships, sailor’s rations, and later, colonial distilleries. Traditional toddies–hot drinks made with boiling water, liquor, sugar, and sometimes spices–saw rum replace their brandy or sherry. Butter was added to enrich the drink, and voila, a brand new, pre-American cocktail was born, the perfect nightcap for a cold New England night.
Water, rum, sugar, spices, and butter. This doesn’t sound like a cocktail you can mess up, does it? But that’s largely the explanation for how this comfort-food in a glass faded into, if not obscurity, a pale imitation of the rich, decadent drink of our forefathers’ winter parties. The sort of pale imitation that makes you gag and grab a beer or cider instead.
Wayne Curtis, author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, lends credence to this theory. In a 2012 Liquor.com article, he quotes author and cocktail historian David Embury’s thoughts on the beverage:
“The lump of butter is the final insult…It blends with the hot rum just about as satisfactorily as warm olive oil blends with champagne!”
Embury wrote this in his 1948 book, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, and well, he’s not wrong. Just sliding in a pat of butter to a hot drink doesn’t exactly make for an appetizing beverage. It looks a lot like a boozy Exxon-Valdez disaster in miniature, and it doesn’t necessarily taste much better.
So, how do you get a good hot buttered rum?
Cocktail aficionado Jack Maxwell, star and host of the Travel Channel’s Booze Traveler, suggests that:
It’s not just about the ingredients, it’s about how it’s made. There’s a lot of practice involved; how long you cook it, how hot it is, if it’s been served right away, if it’s been sitting around.
With that in mind, I sought out somewhere and someone who could make a good hot buttered rum. Where could I go and who could I talk to that would not have boiled down the essential, simple ingredients of a long-lived cocktail into a paint-by-numbers, slapdash disaster?
The answer was Rumba. Situated on Seattle’s iconic Pike Street, Rumba is a rum lover’s paradise. It boasts more than 400 rums from all across the world, a rum-forward craft cocktail menu (including four different daiquiri recipes), and offers patrons a chance to take a tour of Caribbean rums courtesy of a 60-rum map.
Needless to say, Rumba and its bartenders know their rum.
Jim Romdall of Rumba told me that Rumba’s Hot Buttered Rum isn’t just any hot buttered rum, which of course was exactly what I was hoping to hear.
“Our Hot Buttered Rum is pretty complicated stuff, which is why we only do it in December/January,” he said. Fortunately, he was also only too happy to share his tips and tricks for making a great one.
It’s pretty easy to get butter, ice cream, rum, spices, and hot water to taste good. One of the bigger obstacles in making great Hot Buttered Rum is texture and body. It’s like using instant hot chocolate instead of making it from scratch with real chocolate and cream.
To make Rumba’s Hot Buttered Rum, we start out by making a spiced ice cream base. Basic ice cream using real ingredients, a little vanilla, and just a ton of cinnamon and nutmeg, with a bit of clove and allspice. This is your flavor base, so it should taste too much like the spices to eat on its own. You can buy vanilla ice cream and add spices while making the batter, just stick to the brands that don’t use as many chemicals, as the stabilizers they often use cause some odd texture issues while making the batter. We also make our ice cream less sweet than a store ready ice cream so that I can add more sugar while whipping the butter.
When you’re ready to make the batter, set the ice cream out to soften. You want it to be almost like soft serve in texture. You can defrost it in the microwave, just make sure not to melt it fully.Butter should also be set out to soften; it also needs to be very soft and is best at room temperature, but don’t microwave this step, as melted butter won’t stand up to being made into the mix.
My basic ratio is 1 quart of ice cream to 1 lb of butter. This makes a ton of batter, but we’re at a bar, we need it! You can always cut the amount down.
Put butter in a standing mixer and add sugar. I add about 2.5 cups of sugar to 1 lb of butter, but if you’re using a store bought ice cream, you should add less, probably half. Whip the butter and sugar like crazy, you want it to end up as aerated and fluffy as possible.
Now add the spices (unless you made a spiced ice cream). Feel free to play around with the spices as you like. 1 tbsp cinnamon, 1 tsp nutmeg, 1/2 tsp clove, 1/2 tsp allspice are good places to start.
Now add the ice cream while mixing at medium speed, 1 cup at a time. Once it’s all mixed with the butter, crank the speed up high and feel free to use that plastic shield thing that came with your mixer that you’ve probably never used. What you want to end up with is a very aerated and fluffy batter mixture. Once it’s been in the fridge, it should be scoopable and less dense than cookie batter.
What rum you use is also extremely important. At Rumba, we use one of our house blends of rum that consists of 5 rums from Jamaica and Guyana. Since we’re working with a sweet and desserty batter, we need a bold rum to stand up to it. Something rich, but not super sweet on its own. Appleton 12yr is great, Skipper is great, El Dorado 15 is wonderful, but a bit spendy. If you use the lower ages of El Dorado, I’d add a dash of bitters to the mix, since those rums are sweeter.
For the end product, preheat a glass, then add 2 heaping tablespoons of batter, 2 oz rum, and 4 oz boiling water. Mix vigorously to incorporate and create a light froth at the top. Grate with fresh nutmeg and finally enjoy!
Cheers, friends! And happy Friday!
