Buttered Beer No.2 – Modern Recipe

Buttered Beer #2

Buttered Beer (Modern Recipe)

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Course: DrinksCuisine: American
Servings

1

servings
Calories

318

kcal
ABV

7%

Total time

3

minutes

Make a fantastic contemporary buttered beer

Ingredients

Directions

  • Technique: Stove-Top Prepared
  • With the fire off, In a saucepan, combine all the ingredients except for the beer.
  • Whisk the ingredients together. Once combined, add the beer and turn on the flame.
  • Turn off the heat once the beer is lightly warmed. Simply warm the beer. Do not make it hot.
  • Pour into a pint glass and serve.

Featured Video

A Short History Of Cooked Beer Cocktails.

Before the days of bottling and refrigeration, fresh beer had a very limited shelf life, and having to waste any brought a tear to many people’s eyes. So like any food item on its way out, people tried to find ways to get just a couple more uses out of it. I’m sure you do this all the time. Strawberries are starting to get soft; make a smoothie. Worried about your gigantic bag of onions getting too old, make French onion soup. There are many things you can do before food turns and during the 17th century cooking beer with honey and spices was one way to mask the flavor of a beer going bad.

Earlier forms of the hot ale flip we simple hot ale and honey drinks, and if you want to find these recipes, you’ll need to look in old cookbooks. One such recipe from the 1669 book “The Closet” by Sir Kenelme Digbie is an ale with a honey recipe specifically for beer that is about to go bad. Sir Kenelme Digbie described cooking old beer with honey would help the turned old beer and “set the whole a working a fresh, and casting out foulness.”

Some very old books had tips and tricks for the old food, but with the invention of commercial refrigeration in the mid-1800s, that stopped being such a big problem. Most of those recipes either got lost to time, but many still live on as things you usually eat—fruit pies, jellies, alcohol, pickles, hell, even banana bread. Hence, most recipes specifically call for nasty old soft brown bananas no one wants to eat. It’s for flavor, but it comes from a much older tradition. Old meat was a little harder to repurpose and was something you needed to persevere before it started to turn. Although old meat could be used as bait to catch fresh meat or go fishing, it must be disposed of once food goes truly bad.

The Right Beer Makes All The Difference.

Not all beer heat up well. Some taste amazing, and some are awful. As mentioned above, cooked beer cocktails like this were usually done to beers that started to turn and lose flavor. So any flavor improvement was an improvement over drinking old beer, but this gives us some interesting insights into which beers heat up best. Generally speaking, I have found that milder and less flavorful beers taste better hot than more robust, darker beers. Check out my article here, where I have taste-tested many different beers to see which make the best flips. What I have noticed is heating a beer up intensifies its flavors. So a beer that is already very flavorful and strong is amplified and becomes completely undrinkable, while a more mild and light beer opens up beautifully. So it makes sense that older beers that had lost some of their flavors made delicious warmed beer cocktails in the past.

Spiced Butter Batter Recipe.

  • 1/4 tsp (1.5 g) Ground Cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp (1.5 g) Ground Nutmeg
  • 1/4 tsp (1.5 g) Ground Clove
  • 1/4 tsp (1.5 g) Ground Allspice (or 1/2 tbs: Allspice dram)
  • 1/2 tsp (2.5 g) Vanilla extract 
  • 1/2 cup (120 g) Brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup (120 g) Unsalted butter
  1. On very low heat or using a double boiler, just melt the butter and then turn off the heat. Don’t cook and separate the butter. Just melt it.
  2. Next, add all the other ingredients to the melted butter.
  3. Stir till the brown sugar has thoroughly mixed in. Cover spiced butter batter and refrigerate.

This recipe will make about a cup (240 grams) of spiced butter batter mix, about 12 drinks. This is good on biscuits, too, and my kids love this spread on toast.

The Authenticity Of This Recipe.

This is not the classic 1594 buttered beer recipe (That recipe is right here). This is my take on a buttered beer. I wanted to make this a hot buttered beer version of an 18th-century Hot Buttered Rum style. I changed the butter part to use the hot buttered rum’s spiced butter batter instead of the butter and individual spices. I also fortified the beer with a single ounce of rum to add a little strength and extra flavor to the cocktail. I took a hot buttered rum and replaced the hot water with warm beer.

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Spiced Butter Batter Recipe

Spiced Butter Batter

Spiced Butter Batter

0 from 0 votes Only logged in users can rate recipes
Course: DrinksCuisine: American
Servings

10

servings
Calories

150

kcal
Total time

15

minutes

A classic spiced butter batter for hot buttered rum and other hot buttered drinks.

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup Unsalted Butter

  • 1/2 cup Brown Sugar

  • 1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract

  • 1/4 tsp Ground Allspice

  • 1/4 tsp Ground Cloves

  • 1/4 tsp Ground Nutmeg

  • 1/4 tsp Ground Cinnamon

  • Optional Ingredient
  • 1 g Lecithin (as an emulsifier)

Directions

  • On very low heat or using a double boiler, just melt the butter and then turn off the heat. Don’t cook and separate the butter, just melt it. (Optionally blend the butter with Lecithin and whisk together till the lecithin is fully incorporated.)
  • Next simply add all the other ingredients to the melted butter.
  • Stir till the brown sugar has fully mixed in. Cover spiced butter batter and refrigerate.

Featured Video

Why It’s Better To Make A Batter First.

The best way to make this is to make the batter and set it in the fridge for several days before you use it. But you don’t have to make this into a batter if you don’t want to. You could add all these ingredients individually to each drink if you wanted, but a batter is much easier to work with and results in a consistent drink every time. It also results in a slightly more flavorful drink. The oils in the butter help extract the flavors from the spices. Likes dissolve and extract likes, so the oils slowly pull out the yummy delicious oils in the spices in the butter. Alcohol will also bond to oils, but by making the batter and letting it set in the fridge for a couple of days, the oil is given a nice long period to pull out flavors. This way, the drink isn’t just buttery but spiced and flavorful.

The Benefits Of Adding An Emulsifier.

Spiced Butter Batter can be made by combining the butter and spices together, which will taste great. Unfortunately, It will separate from the rest of the liquid in a cold drink. Butter fats solidify around 65f (18c), which must be kept above to stay liquid. Most cocktails are much cooler than that, so once a cocktail is chilled, the fats will turn solid and clump together. The butter will combine and float to the top in hot drinks like hot buttered rum, which is a less than desirable result.

The solution to this is to add an emulsifier. Common emulsifiers in food are lecithin and casein. These are naturally present in foods like eggs and milk but can be bought online as purified powders. Lecithin powder is pretty easy to get and easy to work with. Use 1% of lecithin to the amount you are looking to emulsify. So to emulsify 400g of coconut milk or butter, add 4g of lecithin and thoroughly mix. Bonding lecithin to the fats (or water) will ensure that the fats stay evenly suspended and incorporated in the final drink. It makes the fats water soluble and will result in a hot buttered rum where the fats stay evenly mixed indefinitely.

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Hot Buttered Rum – Colonial Recipe & History

Hot Buttered Rum

Hot Buttered Rum

0 from 0 votes Only logged in users can rate recipes
Course: DrinksCuisine: American
Servings

1

servings
Calories

220

kcal
ABV

10%

Total time

3

minutes

Learn how to make a Hot Buttered Rum.

Ingredients

  • 2/3 oz Spiced Butter Batter

  • 2 oz Gold Rum

  • 6 oz Hot Water

Directions

  • Technique: Build In Glass
  • Drop spiced butter batter into a ceramic or heat-resistant mug.
  • Add hot water and stir till the butter is completely melted and incorporated into the water.
  • Lastly add the rum and give a couple last stirs to finish mixing the drink.

Notes

Featured Video

The History Of Hot Buttered Rum.

Adding butter to hot drinks was not new during colonial America. Butterbeer dates back to the 16th century, but hot buttered rum was an early American twist on this type of drink. In the Americas, rum and molasses were plentiful and reasonably cheap because of their proximity to the Caribbean. Rum was the first real spirit of the Americas, not whiskey. I looked high and low, but I could not find a hot buttered rum-like recipe till the 1860s with Jerry Thomas’s book. I scanned drink and food recipe books and eventually started looking for any historical book older than 1860 that might have a recipe or at least mention a hot buttered rum. Books would mention it but did not provide any form of a recipe. Trust me; I put more effort into this cocktail than any reasonable person should. I did find a mention of it in the 1826 edition of the Pennsylvanian Historical society. I mentioned how it is common for “good women” to have hot buttered rum, wines, and cordial water served to guests at birthing. And if the baby is unwell or fretful, a dose of spirit, water, and spices could help too. I found an 1855 British book called the Practical housewife, which gave a very similar recipe to the one provided but called the drink a buttered toddy. A book from 1830 named “Three Courses and a Dessert” mentions the hot butter rum and says how it’s a terrible meaty drink. I found this referred to as a buttered toddy a couple of times, but not much, the much more common name was still hot buttered rum.

Lord knows I tried, but the earliest I could find this drink mentioned was in the 1826 Pennsylvanian Historical society. The titles of most books that mention hot buttered rums were like the domestic such and such, housewife so and so, or friendly neighbor such and such. They all revolved around the house and made no mention of going out to a tavern, which made me think this was a homemade cocktail. This ultimately means its history is a bit muddy, and there is no single canon recipe, so take this recipe, modify it, and make it your own have fun.

What Does Hot Buttered Rum Taste Like?

This is a fantastic drink spiced well with great texture and flavor. The butter doesn’t come across as heavy or greasy. It adds a nice creamy mouthfeel similar to gum syrup, egg whites, or a full-bodied wine. This drink is not weak either. You can feel the warm rum but the light creamy butter and pumpkin pie spices make it pleasant and not too strong. When I was younger, I used to think of this drink as more of an overly sweet, almost milkshake-like, but it doesn’t have to be. And again, since there is no authentic single canon recipe for this, the recipe I have here is an amalgamation of older recipes I liked. The sweetness and spice toned down a bit with more rum. The 2 ounces of rum helps keep the drink from feeling flat, and the sugar and spice level makes it, so the drink tastes like a cocktail and not a dessert. The hot buttered rum batter is great on anything. I sometimes add it to coffee, on toast, biscuits, pancakes, etc. Add a little more sugar, spice, or butter if you feel the drink needs it. Here is the recipe for the batter, but feel free to check out my article on Spiced Butter Batter.

Spiced Butter Batter Recipe.

  • 1/4 tsp (1.5 g) Ground Cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp (1.5 g) Ground Nutmeg
  • 1/4 tsp (1.5 g) Ground Clove
  • 1/4 tsp (1.5 g) Ground Allspice (or 1/2 tbs: Allspice dram)
  • 1/2 tsp (2.5 g) Vanilla extract 
  • 1/2 cup (120 g) Brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup (120 g) Unsalted butter
  1. On low heat or using a double boiler, melt the butter and turn off the heat. Don’t cook and separate the butter. Only melt the butter.
  2. Next, add all the other ingredients to the melted butter.
  3. Stir till the brown sugar has thoroughly mixed in. Cover spiced butter batter and refrigerate.

This recipe will make about a cup (240 grams) of spiced butter batter mix, about 12 drinks. This is good on biscuits, too, and my kids love this spread on toast.

Recipe Resources

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