Winter warmers

With commitment, seasonal beverages needn’t stop after the holidays

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No season is paired with better drinking than winter. Hot alcoholic beverages warm bodies on snowy strolls or mountain hikes. Powerful and rich drinks warm the soul with fat and liquor.

All too often, though, we succumb to several common pitfalls of wintertime drinking: we associate them only with the holidays and stop drinking still-seasonal beverages after New Year’s; we burn out on them before December’s over; or we don’t think to expand our seasonal drinking horizons with new drinks.

Some of those issues are caused by tradition, and some are caused by commercialism. You can’t always find eggnog in stores after the holidays, and we’re so used to drinking it at specific times and during specific holidays, that you might not want to seek it out or make it at home at all.

But as long as the weather is cold and snow is falling, there are plenty of drinks from around the world and from many traditions that can make this drinking season a good one.

Let’s start with mulled wine. There simply is nothing like a cup of piping hot, spiced red wine on a chilly day. It’s a drink celebrated and spun by many cultures around the world, and estimates put its origin back to second century Rome. Though it’s gaining popularity in the U.S. (you can snag some local mulled wine at What We Love in Boulder), mulled wine is most celebrated in the United Kingdom, Germany and Norway.

In the UK, it’s consumed almost exclusively as a drink for those celebrating the Christmas season. Though there is precedent for it being served throughout winter, the hot beverage of choice for the full season is historically mulled ale or cider, which we’ll get to in a bit. The British version of mulled wine, though, varies by region and family, but is likely to include some forms of citrus, fennel, ginger and baking spices 

When I was 17, I had my first taste of mulled wine at the Christmas market in Munich, Germany. I drank too much and puked behind a shop that sold cuckoo clocks. I’ve tried to eradicate that memory, and instead, the image of families and friends gathering and standing around waist-high tables made of old drink barrels, with steam from wine mixing with the visible condensation of breath is the romantic, wintry image I choose to remember.

In Germany and Austria, mulled wine (typically called glühwein) contains many of the same ingredients as the British version, but is sometimes embellished with vanilla, chocolate or liqueur.

Norway’s mulled wine, glogg, embellishes the German glühwein, with the same spices, an added shot of liquor and food accompaniments like ginger cookies or raisin bread. Pre-made glogg mixes are sold in stores for the thirsty masses, and it is sometimes made throughout Scandinavia with white wine or port wine.

Other countries do mulled wine uniquely, too: Bulgaria mixes in peppercorns and honey; France’s vin chaud is dry and unsweet; and in Quebec, they mix maple syrup and hard liquor into the wine and heat it all up for drinking throughout the season, but especially during the illustrious Winter Carnival.

You could also try spiced sake, what the Japanese call toso. It’s consumed during New Year’s celebrations to essentially get rid of the old and welcome in the new. The hot rice wine is typically spiced with ginger, Japanese pepper, cinnamon, Chinese bellflower, rhubarb and medicinal roots and herbs.

Once trying out the variations of mulled wine run their course, you can switch over to wassail, or hot cider. Wassail is, again, traditionally downed during the holiday season, but the drink is practically made for winter adventures.

It started in Southern England as warmed mead with roasted crabapples tossed in. It’s gotten better since then, thankfully. Centuries of trial and error turned wassail into a mixture of hot wine, cider or ale, with brandy or liqueur added, and then stirred together with apples, oranges and other fruits. Eggs are sometimes added for thickness, as are spices like cinnamon sticks, nutmeg and cloves.

The best part of wassail is going wassailing. Early wassailers would take the beverage out and sing and drink to the health of trees in local orchards, in hopes that it would scare away evil demons and promote a good harvest the following year. Then, the wassail king and queen directed songs, and placed a piece of wassail-soaked toast on a tree at each orchard as a gift to the spirits. (If this all sounds too British for you, just remember that Johnny Appleseed planted orchards throughout the Midwest mostly for people to produce cider, and thus wassail. Think of him as our American wassail king.)

All you need to do to go modern day wassailing is brew up a batch, put it in a thermos and walk about town singing about trees. That’s bound to make a cold February afternoon fun, no?

Perhaps no drink summons the holiday spirit and dies more quickly than eggnog, though its history doesn’t directly tie in to Christmas or any other winter holiday at all. Born, again, out of England, it’s traditionally been made with milk or cream, sugar, raw eggs, spices and some kind, or kinds, of alcohol. Nowadays, thankfully for us lac-tose-intolerant and vegan folks, they make eggnog without dairy or eggs, and often it tastes better than milk- or cream-based stuff. Soynog, thickened by tofu, is nice, and coconut nog has fatty richness, but the go-to for me is almond nog, which most accurately mimics the flavor and consistency of the real stuff.

The important thing with a traditional eggnog is the liquor. Brandy should make up the majority of the liquor base, with a splash of rum and a splash of bourbon added in. The combination of rum and brandy adds deep fruity sweetness, and the bourbon adds heat and fire. Nutmeg and cinnamon should be used liberally.

There’s also variations on eggnog from around the world. In Chile, folks drink colemono, or monkey’s tail. It’s a bit like a white Russian, with a liquor like pisco, vodka or rum mixed with milk, sugar, coffee and cloves. There’s also the Puerto Rican coquito, which is a shot of rum, coconut milk, condensed milk, egg yolks, vanilla and baking spices. And in Germany, there’s eierpunsch, or egg punch, which is warmed eggnog with black tea and an optional liquor addition.