Since there are so many amazing drinks out there, I don’t like to write about any one cocktail more than once – it takes away opportunities to introduce more. But this weather has been so accursedly cold that I’ll make an exception for the Hot Buttered Rum, which we first wrote about a long while ago but which is so perfect for winter that it deserves another look. – Andrew

Illustration by Shauna Lynn for Oh So Beautiful Paper

Hot Buttered Rum

2 oz Aged Rum
3/4 oz Simple Syrup
6 oz Hot Water
1/2 oz Unsalted Butter

Combine the syrup, water, and butter in a mug and stir until the syrup and butter are thoroughly melted. Add the rum and stir again. Garnish with cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Enjoy!

Hot buttered rum is basically a rum Hot Toddy – rich, sweet, and so warming – but with the addition of melted butter, which adds to the body of the drink and a silky mouthfeel. I like to use Royal Rose’s Cardamon-Clove Simple Syrup here, to add an additional layer of spicy complexity.

Rum these days has lots of tropical connotations: Tiki drinks and Caribbean rum punches. But for a long time – from the late 1600s to the early 1800s –rum was the spirit of choice in the decidedly non-tropical New England. New Englanders got very good at a couple of things: mixing everything they could find with rum, and making drinks to ward off the chill of New England winters. Including butter, which might seem strange to us now but probably made perfect sense to a society that didn’t have modern cough drops to treat sore throats – and actually could use those extra calories to help stay warm. You’ll have to figure out what to do with those on your own.

*Some of those drinks turned out pretty good, like the Stone Fence. Some of those drinks turned out not so good, like the Black Strap – a mix of rum and molasses that is so dreadfully awful that it’s the one classic cocktail that I can’t recommend.

Photo Credits: Nole Garey for Oh So Beautiful Paper