The Peanut Malt Flip is the cocktail of the flavour. Consider it my souvenir to y'all.

One way to think of the world of mixed drinks is a kind of graph, with deliciousness on i axis and strangeness on the other. Lumped together on one end of the spectrum are most of the drinks you know, which tend to be very succulent and not at all weird, your Margaritas and Mojitos and Manhattans and such. Travel over to the strange cease of the spectrum, and you notice deliciousness begins to suffer—these are your house-smoked bee-pollen syrups and duck fat-washed Negronis. They're certainly dissimilar—novelty is the dragon we mixologists are always chasing—but that deviation comes at a price. The truly delicious terrain, for the most part, has already been mapped.

Enter the Peanut Malt Flip, the cocktail for which that principle is delightfully untrue. It's a potable that is almost certainly unlike whatsoever you've ever had earlier, even if all the individual ingredients are old friends. I suppose information technology's all about context: A carton of eggs is a fairly ordinary sight, but produce ane behind the bar, and people might expect at you sideways. Join it with a jug of milk, and it may raise some eyebrows. Add together to that a jar of peanut butter, and your guests volition be looking behind you with furrowed brows, trying to effigy out if y'all're hiding an oven back there, and it is, in my feel, when the yous grab the bottle of scotch whisky that people can't concur it in any longer. "What are you making?," they'll ask. That'southward when you smile and endeavor non to await devious every bit you respond with a question of your ain: "Do you trust me?"

The Peanut Malt Flip was invented by Angus Winchester in 2006. Winchester would later become famous in alcohol circles every bit the Global Brand Ambassador for Tanqueray, just at the time he was a bartender and consultant, and created it for the relaunch of the impossibly elegant M Bar, in Hong Kong'south Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Part of the bar's menu was a tribute to the "hereafter" of cocktails, and the team went in search of peachy and unusual season combinations. "We read that single malt whisky and peanut butter share flavor elements," he says, "we decided to put them together and voilà."

Voilà indeed. The Peanut Malt Flip is a phenomenal drinkable and one of my very favorite things to brand for people around the holidays. That information technology sounds bizarre is role of the fun, considering it doesn't sense of taste unusual in the slightest, despite the fact that it has something like xi g of protein and is substantially a snack. The cream provides richness, the scotch gives it malty trunk and the egg works as an emulsifier to bring everything harmoniously together. As for the peanut butter, well, the peanut butter is what makes it fine art.

The crazy thing is that this cocktail near faded out of existence, about lost to fourth dimension. It's not in whatsoever bar books (equally far as I know) and Googling brings upwardly almost nothing. Boston bartending legend Misty Kalkofan put it on a cheeky little egg-centric Easter cocktail bill of fare in 2007 when she was working at Greenish Street Grille in Cambridge, and after that stuck it on their reserve listing, a hundreds-deep book of cocktails that regulars of the bar could consult when they had exhausted that season's menu. This is where I constitute it, by sheer luck, every bit Green Street just happened to be next to my flat when I lived there. If non for that little fortuitous accident, all my Christmases since would have been without Peanut Malt Flips, and that'southward a timeline too dark to entertain.

That brings us here, where information technology is my cracking laurels to present it to y'all. "It was the just potable I have ever 'invented,'" Winchester says, with classic British humility, "that deserved to exist fabricated again."

Peanut Malt Flip

  • ii oz. scotch
  • 1 oz. cream
  • 0.75 oz. uncomplicated syrup
  • i tbsp. peanut butter
  • 1 egg

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker, seal tight, and shake without water ice for about 5 seconds to whip and emulsify the egg. Add ice and milkshake for 10 to 12 seconds, strain into a large coupe or wine glass and garnish with some freshly grated nutmeg over the top.

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

Macallan Double Cask 12 Year Old

Photo: Courtesy of Macallan

Scotch: When I asked him near it, Winchester thinks he remembers that he may take used Talisker, the smoky single malt from the Island of Skye. That's about as smoky every bit I'd cartel—salvage your big brawny Islay bottles for something else. Kalkofan, on the other mitt, used Macallan 12 for her Easter carte back in 2007, which is what I gravitate toward. If I had my pick of the litter I'd utilize a sherried unmarried malt like Macallan. Aberlour is a swell selection, every bit is Glendronach. You lot can go far with composite scotch if you like, but I recommend a malt—every other ingredient is so full flavored, it's better if the scotch has the full body of 100 percent malt.

Cream: I commonly apply one-half and half, but both that and cream work well. I wouldn't go leaner—but yous run the risk of thinning out the texture more you lot'd like. If yous tin can't practice lactose, y'all can sub in your favorite constitute milk, merely go it as rich as you can.

Simple Syrup: Equal parts, sugar and h2o, and stir until the sugar dissolves. Using hot water will go far dissolve faster (30 seconds vs. iii to v minutes with room temp water).

Egg: We've written virtually this before—American eggs are largely safety, but you ever run a small chance with raw eggs, merely as you do with sushi and medium rare hamburgers. I've literally never heard of someone getting sick from eggs in cocktails, but if y'all're worried well-nigh it, use pasteurized in-shell eggs.

Peanut Butter: You want the natural stuff, the jars for which the ingredients are just peanuts and salt. This is not the time for Skippy. It might yet work, but Jif and Skippy and all those are sweetened and processed, and so they'll throw off the residual and I tin can't promise they'll integrate into the cocktail in the same way.