Winter cocktails: hot, stirred and rich drinks for December to February

Choose by what the evening needs. A hot drink warms the hands and is gone in twenty minutes. A stirred drink is cold, strong and slow. A cream drink closes a meal.

For Christmas Day itself, from the first glass of fizz to Boxing Day, see Christmas drinks. Hot Buttered Rum, the Tom and Jerry and the other hot drinks built on rum are compared in hot rum drinks.

The Hot Toddy is the simplest of them. Warm a heatproof glass with hot water and tip it out. Add 15ml of honey syrup, 15ml of fresh lemon juice and 120ml of water just off the boil, and stir. Add 60ml of Scotch last and stir once more. Drop in a lemon wheel studded with cloves and a cinnamon stick.

Make the honey syrup two parts honey to one part warm water; neat honey sinks and clumps. The whisky goes in last so it joins a glass that has already cooled a few degrees, which keeps its smell in the drink. Irish whiskey makes a softer toddy, bourbon a sweeter one, and dark rum works well too.

An Irish Coffee takes the place of coffee after a meal. Warm an Irish coffee mug, add a teaspoon of demerara sugar and 120ml of hot filter coffee, and stir until the sugar dissolves. Add 50ml of Irish whiskey and stir once. Whip 50ml of cream only until it thickens to the texture of cold pouring custard, then float it over the back of a warm spoon to fill the last centimetre. Serve it without a spoon; the coffee is drunk through the cream.

If the cream sinks, one of three things went wrong: the coffee was not sweetened, the cream was whipped too little or too much, or it was poured straight in rather than over a spoon.

The Brandy Sling, served hot, is the sharper choice: 15ml sugar syrup and 20ml fresh lemon juice in a warmed glass, then 50ml brandy or cognac and 90ml water just off the boil, with nutmeg grated over the top.

Hot Buttered Rum is built on a batter. For each drink, beat 30g of softened butter with 15g of brown sugar, ground cinnamon, allspice, a pinch of clove and a little vanilla, then stir it through 60ml of dark rum and 150ml of water just off the boil. Made in a batch, we keep the batter for two weeks in the fridge. The full method is on the Hot Buttered Rum recipe.

Every hot drink follows the same rules. Use water just off the boil, because a rolling boil drives the spirit’s smell out of the glass. Warm the glass first, because a cold one takes the heat straight out of the drink. Add the spirit as late as the recipe allows.

Mulled Wine serves six to eight. Put 750ml red wine, 150ml brandy, 100ml fresh orange juice, 75ml honey, two cinnamon sticks, six cloves, two star anise and a few wide strips of citrus peel in a large pan. Warm it over the lowest heat until the surface steams, then hold it there for fifteen to twenty minutes, stirring once or twice as the honey dissolves. Never let it boil.

Use a medium-bodied, unoaked red with soft tannins. Heavy oak fights the spice, and a thin, sharp red turns sour when warm. Keep the spices whole; ground spice clouds the pan.

In January the Wassail has a second outing. Orchard wassailing, which blesses apple trees for the coming crop, falls on Twelfth Night and in many places on Old Twelfth Night, 17 January. The bowl is cloudy apple juice and dry cider with cinnamon, ginger and a clove-studded orange, held below a simmer, with brandy or calvados added off the heat if you want it.

Cold punches for a December party, and what can be made ahead for each, are in how to batch cocktails.

The Rusty Nail is built in the glass: 45ml Scotch and 25ml Drambuie over a large cube in a rocks glass, stirred for 15 to 20 seconds, with a lemon twist expressed and dropped in. Drambuie’s honey and herbs sit on the whisky, and the drink is stronger than it tastes.

The Manhattan is 50ml rye, 20ml sweet vermouth and a dash of Angostura, stirred with ice for 20 to 30 seconds in a mixing glass and strained into a chilled coupe with a cherry. We keep the vermouth in the fridge and replace it within a month of opening; a tired bottle shows.

The Boulevardier is a Negroni with bourbon in place of gin: 45ml bourbon, 30ml Campari and 30ml sweet vermouth, stirred and strained over fresh ice, with orange peel. The bourbon’s vanilla softens the Campari.

The Old Standard is our rum Old Fashioned. Stir 10ml demerara syrup, two dashes of Angostura and one of orange bitters in a mixing glass, add 50ml Expedition Spiced Rum and ice, and stir for 20 to 30 seconds. Strain over one large cube and express orange peel over the top.

For Burns Night on 25 January, Scotch takes over, and Burns Night drinks covers the whisky for the supper.

The Brandy Alexander is 30ml cognac, 30ml crème de cacao and 30ml cream, shaken very hard for 12 seconds and double strained into a chilled Nick and Nora glass, with nutmeg grated over it. Sixty millilitres of spirit and liqueur sit under the cream, so one is plenty.

The White Russian is 50ml vodka and 25ml coffee liqueur stirred for 20 to 30 seconds over one large cube, with 30ml of cream floated on top over the back of a spoon so it marbles. The drinker decides when to stir it.

The Porto Flip is port and a yolk: 45ml tawny port, 15ml brandy and 10ml egg yolk, dry shaken for 10 to 15 seconds, then shaken with ice for 10 to 12 seconds, and double strained into a small chilled coupe with nutmeg grated over. Use British Lion eggs, which the Food Standards Agency advises are safe to eat raw.

Cream reads as sweet, so these drinks taste sweeter than their recipes look. Serve them small, after the meal rather than beside it.

After Christmas many people drink less, or nothing, for a few weeks. Make the alcohol-free drink as good as the rest. A Hot Spiced Cider base left unspiked is a complete hot drink, and the Chocolate Orange Mocktail, 75ml fresh orange juice, 20ml chocolate syrup and 22.5ml single cream shaken hard, does the job of a Brandy Alexander.

Smaller measures help too. A single 25ml measure of a 40% ABV spirit is one UK unit, and most of the drinks above carry two or more.

Valentine’s Day falls in February, and Valentine’s Day drinks covers drinks for two. By the end of the month the evenings lengthen, and the hot drinks give way to cold ones.

Serve hot drinks in heat-resistant glass. An Irish coffee mug is heat-resistant glass on a short stem with a handle, usually holding 200 to 250ml. Our Irish Coffee comes to about 225ml with its cream, so choose one of 230ml or more. A thin glass not made for heat can crack when the hot water goes in. Measure every spirit with a jigger, and grate nutmeg fresh with a nutmeg grater.

Heat does not take the alcohol out. In US Department of Agriculture tests, alcohol stirred into a hot liquid kept about 85% of its strength, so count a Hot Toddy as you would a cold drink.

Alcohol does not warm you either. It widens the blood vessels near the skin, so you feel warmer while losing heat faster, and the NHS advises against giving alcohol to anyone who is very cold. After a cold walk, make the first hot drink an alcohol-free one.