Posset

Winter time, especially around the holiday season, is a time for get-togethers, hot drinks and getting together over some hot drinks. The season is also a time for spiced drinks like Eggnog and Glühbier (mulled beer). The Posset is a historic holiday drink that, while not nearly as famous as mulled beer or Eggnog, shares some similarities with them. Although the full recipe takes a couple of hours, this classic drink is accomplished in a crockpot, so it’s best as a set-it-and-forget-it type of recipe. Get a batch started before friends arrive, then spoon into coffee mugs.

Even relying on the crock pot for much of the work, the recipe is in an intensive one, with an array of ingredients and implements needed to make it. The base of it is beer, the kind of which is generally up to the person making it. “We use an IPA as the beer base,” says Mike Bohn of Brooklyn's Olmsted of this, the restaurant's in-house recipe. “[It] gives the drink a contrasting freshness from the hops and citrus, plus a little porter thrown in to adds some coffee richness.”

For the wintery spices, this Posset is infused with mace, allspice berries, cloves and cinnamon. Strega—an Italian liqueur with notes of mint and fennel—plus allspice dram and velvet falernum add even more rich spices and botanicals while raising the proof a bit. All of those beers, liqueurs and spices get a rich, creamy element from heavy cream and eggs and sweetness from plain old sugar. The end result is a combination of a mulled beer and Eggnog, but with its own identity.