Advocaat
The Netherlands in a bottle: egg yolks, sugar and brandy emulsified into something between a drink and a dessert. Thick enough in its Dutch form to be eaten with a spoon, and the whole reason the Snowball exists.
Quick Facts
About Advocaat
Flavour Profile
Primary Flavours
Tasting Notes
Sweet egg custard with a brandy floor: dessert’s liqueur form, engineered for lemonade’s lift.
Custard, Bottled
Advocaat is egg yolks, sugar and brandy emulsified to velvet, and it behaves far more like a dessert than like a liqueur. The alcohol is low by liqueur standards, usually somewhere between 15 and 20%, because the yolks and sugar are doing most of the work.
There are two thicknesses and they are genuinely different products. The Dutch domestic style is thick enough to be eaten with a spoon and is sold with one. The export style is thinner and pourable, which is what a Snowball assumes and what a British bottle almost always contains.
Nobody Is Certain About the Name
The account usually given traces it to a Dutch colonial drink made with avocado, rebuilt at home with egg yolks when the fruit was not available, the name surviving the ingredient it had described. It is a satisfying story and it may well be right.
The competing account is duller and harder to dismiss: advocaat is Dutch for lawyer, and the drink was held to smooth the throat for someone who had to speak at length. Both are offered in good faith by people who have looked. Anyone stating one as settled fact is going beyond the evidence.
The Snowball
Britain adopted it through one drink. The Snowball is advocaat lengthened with sparkling lemonade and sharpened with lime, and it sells the nation’s advocaat every December and always has. The Fluffy Duck extends the same custard in a tropical direction.
The lime is not optional, whatever the bottle suggests. Advocaat on its own with lemonade is sweet on sweet, and the cordial is the only thing in the glass providing any acidity to cut through it.
It Is Real Egg
The bottle behaves like the dessert it is. Refrigerate it once open and finish it within weeks rather than treating it like a spirit that will sit until next Christmas, because the eggs in it are real and the label says so.
It also settles. An emulsion left standing between Decembers separates quietly, so shake the bottle before pouring rather than assuming what comes out first represents what is in it.
Using Advocaat
Usage
The Snowball is its British immortality, advocaat under sparkling lemonade every Christmas; the Fluffy Duck its cheekier cousin. Elsewhere it pours over ice cream and into coffee as the Low Countries always intended.
Top Tips
- Thick is correct: good advocaat pours like cold custard and needs the lemonade’s help.
- Refrigerate after opening: the eggs are real and the bottle says so.
- Shake the bottle before pouring: the emulsion settles between Christmases.
Possible Substitutions
- Eggnog, in a thicker mood: the American cousin
- Vanilla custard loosened with brandy: the kitchen sketch
Storage & Handling
Refrigerate once opened and finish within the season: egg rules.
Shelf Life
Months unopened; weeks refrigerated once open
Production Method
Egg yolks, sugar and brandy emulsified into a thick liqueur custard: the name descends, by the standard account, from a Dutch colonial avocado drink whose fruit the homeland swapped for yolks.