The Best Christmas Cocktails to Make This Holiday Season

Eggnog is a hard sell because most people have only had the bad kind, those boring and occasionally gross cartons that line the dairy section of the supermarket every December. Not to overstate it, but this is a tragedy. Eggnog is an aged spirit mixed with eggs, cream, sugar and spices. Do you like ice cream? Great, you’ll like Eggnog. Honestly the only substantial difference between rum ice cream and Eggnog is that the Eggnog has too much alcohol to freeze. It’s liquid dessert. It’s the physical manifestation of treating yourself to, ounce-for-ounce, one of the most outrageously delicious things you can drink. It’s the kind of double-barrel decadence that, one month from now when your New Year’s resolutions have you mainlining adaptogens and doing YouTube yoga, you can look back with a satisfied smile, knowing that you made the most of your Holidays. So enjoy the season and make one now.

Separate the eggs and keep the whites to use somewhere else—like a merengue or your Whiskey Sour. Using an immersion blender or mixer, beat the yolks with the sugar in a large mixing bowl until the mixture lightens in color. Add dairy to a large bowl, then add the liquor and salt, then slowly beat in the egg mixture. Pour into glass jar or bottle and store in the fridge indefinitely. To serve, pour about 5 oz. into a small glass and garnish with some freshly grated nutmeg. Serves 24.

The problem with adding smoke to your cocktails is that it’s a blunt tool that’s so easy to use wrong. When you’re out at a bar and see the glass cloche filled with smoke lifted to reveal a drink inside, it’s a pretty safe bet that the cocktail will not be good. Smoking a cocktail like that is far too imprecise. But there is a better way to smoke your cocktail and in an episode of our Cocktails for Grown Ups, we show you how to do it. First, we demonstrate how you can smoke your syrup if you’re making a bunch of smoky drinks. Second, we show you our method when you’re making just one drink at a time. The smoky cocktail in question here is the Palo Santo, one created for the Michelin three-star restaurant Addison.

Combine ingredients in a mixing glass with ice and stir for 10 to 25 seconds (shorter for small ice, longer for big ice). Then, put a piece of palo santo wood on a non-reactive surface (stainless steel, a cast iron pan, or just a larger piece of different wood) and burn it with a blowtorch until it starts to smoke. Invert your glass over the smoke and let it infuse there for eight to 10 seconds, then flip the glass right-side-up, allowing the smoke to escape. Then add ice to a rocks glass and strain the drink over that fresh ice, and garnish with an orange peel.

In the world of tequila, it’s the raw brightness of the blancos that garners most of the attention, but when you get into the añejos—tequilas that have slumbered in oak barrels for a few years—you open up a whole new world of potential. You could have a lovely time just drinking Manhattan variations with añejos and sherry instead of whiskey and vermouth, but add some fresh citrus and cinnamon in a large format, and introduce your guests to the deeply spiced luxuriousness of aged agave spirits. 

To make the spiced syrup take 1⁄2 cup sugar, 4 oz. water, four to six cloves, two to four allspice berries and one star anise pod, and combine in a small pot over medium heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Reduce to simmer, covered, for five minutes, then remove from heat and let cool. Once the spiced syrup has been off heat for about five to 10 minutes, peel six lemons and add the peels to spiced syrup, then stir briefly. Let cool to room temperature, then strain out solids. Combine spiced syrup with the rest of the liquids and chill. When it’s time to serve, pour mixture into a large serving bowl and add a very large piece of ice. Garnish with cinnamon sticks, star anise pods and orange wheels.

One of the biggest problems with an Espresso Martini has been that so few restaurants (let alone homes) have espresso, and aren’t going to get it—we just simply weren’t willing to do the work to make this drink great. But the past decade has done us two favors: It has given us better liqueurs and made cold brew (ice coffee’s stronger big brother) universally available. Suddenly, it’s easy to make the Espresso Martini great, as cold brew has a much longer shelf life than espresso, and is incalculably easier to procure. This has allowed the Espresso Martini—the version that isn’t bad—to be democratized and modernized at the same time. This updated take has an arching dynamic complexity, a deep coffee richness and a sweetness held very much in check. It’s a delightful little drink to have with dessert, if you’d like something stiffer than just a cappuccino with your pie.

Add ingredients to shaker tin, and shake well over ice. Strain up into a coupe or cocktail glass, and garnish with three coffee beans. 

The Hot Mulled Apple Cider cocktail is the most labor-intensive on this list, but even in this august company, it might be the tastiest. It’s also pure fall: Apples are at their very best right now, and we insist that juicing them, mulling the juice with spices and spiking it with Irish whiskey “warms you from the inside in a way you otherwise can only get by watching videos of soldiers coming home to their dogs.” It seems like everyone on the internet has a Mulled Apple Cider recipe and a lot of them get the main points wrong, so check out the instructions here, and then do yourself a favor and make it.

Designed for an 8 oz. mug—scale up as needed

Pour whiskey and cider into a pre-heated mug, leaving a little less than one inch of room from the rim. Gently pour half-whipped unsweetened cream so it layers on top. Garnish with a pinch of ground cinnamon.

Say less. For many if not most, the phrase “Boozy Hot Chocolate” is enough for a “yes, please.” It is also, we discovered through rigorous testing, “a robust and durable template, one that practically begs for customization and there’s no one best way to do it.” You could just add a shot of whatever’s closest in reach to microwaved Swiss Miss and it would still be pretty good, but we spent some time decoding how to really make it shine.

Pre-warm your mug with some hot water. Add all ingredients (except alcohol) to a small saucepan over low heat and stir, taking care not to scald the milk. Empty the hot water from your mug and add 1.5 oz. alcohol. Once all the chocolate is dissolved and the temperature is where you want it (usually about 150 degrees—milk scalds at 170), pour hot chocolate into mug, stir briefly to combine and garnish with as many baby marshmallows as will fit.

Consider the Brandy Alexander, a cocktail so old the mere mention of it invites the images of grandparents and gramophones. The Brandy Alexander is brandy (Cognac, usually, that most celebrated type of brandy), crème de cacao, and cream. Almost as early as you can find it mentioned you can find it insulted and dismissed—in 1930’s host guide Shake Em Up, authors Virginia Elliot and Phil D. Strong lump it into a category for “tender young things who have just been taken off stick candy,” and offer that you can use crème de cacao to “make them up some kind of [drink] and push them under the piano to suck on it.” The reliably grumpy David Embury, in 1948, calls it “deadly” because it “taste[s] harmless,” and waves it off as “a futile waste of good liquor.”

If you catch yourself nodding along, I have a question for you: Have you ever actually tasted a Brandy Alexander? If you had, you’d already know that the Brandy Alexander is not just worth your time but is in fact shockingly delicious, and one of the best things you can have after a meal. There is, of course, a way to make it too sweet, but increase the measure of Cognac just a touch and the drink becomes locked into balance, a decadent delight, the chocolate and cream round and deeply satisfying, all driven by the Cognac’s powerful oak and fruit.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain off the ice into a cocktail or coupe glass, and garnish with a shave of fresh nutmeg.

The Peanut Malt Flip sounds weird. A glance at the ingredients looks weird. And this apparent strangeness is one of its principal charms, because make one for yourself and you’ll find it doesn’t taste strange in the slightest—just pure, decadent deliciousness. The scotch gives body, cream gives richness, and as for the Peanut Butter, we write, “the peanut butter is what makes it art.”

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker, seal tight and shake without ice for about five seconds to whip and emulsify the egg. Add ice and shake for 10 to 12 seconds, strain into a large coupe or wine glass and garnish with some freshly grated nutmeg over the top.

In 2004 in San Francisco, everyone who was doing “mixology” was leaning into the region’s year-round availability of fresh produce, so the city’s cocktails were full of things like satsuma mandarins and fennel bulbs and garnished with fistfuls of lemon balm. Jon Santer, with his Revolver, went a different way. This dark and broody Old Fashioned variation is, we claim, “among the best cocktails in the neo-classic pantheon,” and comes with a bonus kick of caffeine to help keep the night going.

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Add all ingredients to a rocks glass over a large piece of ice and stir. Garnish with a flamed orange peel or a regular orange peel.

Cocktails made with fat-washed spirits have been around for nearly 20 years now, with the pioneers at New York’s PDT creating a bourbon Old Fashioned infused with the flavor of real bacon. It only made sense for the fat-washing trend to come to other classics like the Martini as well, with olive oil being the fat used.

We’ve tried countless Olive Oil Martinis over the years and never really found one we’ve liked. That was until we tried one with fresh, high-quality olive oil. The oil you use is so vital that the infused spirit is not even worth making if you aren’t reaching for the good stuff. If you do have great olive oil, you will have an excellent drink.

Add all ingredients to a mixing glass, add ice, and stir briskly for 10 to 20 seconds (longer for bigger ice, shorter for smaller). Strain into a Martini or coupe glass, and garnish with three high-quality olives and, if you feel like it, a few drops of olive oil.

The Hot Toddy is the ultimate winter drink. Some drinks are so foundational to our understanding of mixed beverages that they’re less invented than discovered, like fire itself. Some Hot Toddys are like Whiskey Sours (whiskey, citrus, sweetener and hot water) and some are like Old Fashioneds (whiskey, sweetness, spice and hot water), but either way, the Hot Toddy is like whiskey chicken soup, the perfect drink to displace any physical or emotional chill.

Boil water. Pour boiling water into a mug, to pre-warm it. After a minute, empty water, add ingredients (see below), top with boiling water and garnish with a lemon or orange slice studded with cloves and/or a cinnamon stick.

The Old Cuban—aged rum, lime, simple syrup, and mint, with Angostura Bitters and Champagne—is very often described as a combination of a French 75 and a Mojito, but we think that’s not quite right. Both of those latter cocktails are pure brightness, while the vanilla from the aged rum and the spice from the bitters in the Old Cuban moves it from poolside to inside as if under a slowly twisting ceiling fan in a smoky room, long narrow beams of light through the wooden shutters. It is the darker side of refreshing, the more alluring and seductive side, and has our vote for one of the best cocktails invented in the last 20 years.

Add all ingredients except wine to a cocktail shaker with ice, shake well for 10 to 12 seconds and strain into a flute or stemmed cocktail glass. Top with wine and garnish with a mint leaf or sprig.

Back when legendary bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler was still behind the stick at the dearly departed Clyde Common, one of the many recipes he developed was his tequila- and sherry-based take on the yuletide classic. So if you’d like to switch up from bourbon to tequila for your eggnog, give this one a try, from his tome The Bar Book: Elements of Cocktail Technique.

In a blender or stand mixer on low speed, beat eggs until smooth. Slowly add sugar until incorporated and dissolved. Slowly add tequila, sherry, milk, and cream. Refrigerate overnight and serve in small chilled cups. Dust with fresh nutmeg before serving.