Our Favorite Flaming Cocktail Recipes

You always remember your first flaming cocktail. For St. John Frizell, a mixologist and one of the owners of New York’s storied Gage & Tollner restaurant, it was café brûlot at Antoine’s in New Orleans. As the maître d’ ladled flaming-blue brandy down a spiraled orange peel and into the bowl below, Frizell watched in awe.

“I just thought, Oh, my God, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. “It’s a ceremony. It’s not just a drink they serve. They really make a big deal out of it, and it seems almost like a conjuration.”

After that, Frizell was hooked. He bought his own café brûlot set and makes a batch of the boozy coffee every year for friends and family. But his interest in flaming cocktails didn’t stop there.

When he owned the now-shuttered Red Hook bar Fort Defiance, he was known to fire up bowls of Charles Dickens’s famous punch and even hosted the occasional round of snapdragon, a Victorian-era game that blends booze, nuts, and flames. Today at the Sunken Harbor Club, the tiki bar above Gage & Tollner, bartenders perform pyrotechnics by spraying high-proof rum through flames and sprinkling cinnamon (the spice will spark when lit) over their cocktails.

I’ve had fiery cocktails on the mind lately. Now that the holidays are over and the winter chill has settled in to stay, I’ve been looking for warmth and joy wherever I can find it. And nothing quite cuts through the cold, black night like blazing booze.

Frizell agrees. “There is something really reassuring, I think, on a primal level, to guests when you perform a ceremony with fire in front of them in the middle of winter,” he says.

To fight the January doldrums, I threw a flaming cocktail party last week. We stirred bowls of punch, tossed tendrils of flaming whisky mug to mug, and thrust fiery-hot pokers into tankards of ale. Here’s what worked, what didn’t, and what wowed.

The Sweet Treat: The Hot Ale Flip

Years ago, I learned that Ulysses S. Grant was a fan of a drink known as the Hot Ale Flip. On many a cold evening, a young Grant would sneak out of West Point to the local tavern, where the barkeeps would thrust hot pokers into tankards, transforming their contents into frothy, sweet brews.

While the Flip doesn’t involve directly flaming the drink, it warrants inclusion here for its innovative use of fire. Back in the day when every tavern had a roaring fireplace keeping patrons toasty, bartenders could reach for a red-hot poker when they needed to inject a drink with some heat. In the case of the Flip, the drink’s contents—ale, rum, sugar, and egg—are caramelized by the poker, leading to a cocktail that’s warm and sweet.

We made our Flips using Sarah Lohman’s recipe, but swapped out amber ale for doppelbock. “It tastes like a milkshake,” one of my friends said. The head of the brew became a marshmallow-flavored foam, and the drink itself was rich and chocolatey. Doppelbocks are already quite sweet and strong, so if you prefer something lighter, I’d opt for the traditional amber ale instead.

I’d also highly recommend trying to find a fireplace to make a true Hot Ale Flip with a poker fresh from the embers. There’s something incredibly satisfying about plunging hot iron into a mug and watching the brew bubble around it. But if you can’t track one down, a blowtorch and a “beer poker” made for caramelizing ales will work fine.

The Party Pleaser: Charles Dickens’s Punch

For Charles Dickens, mixing drinks at parties blended the author’s penchant for performance, storytelling, and conviviality. As one guest recounted, Dickens would dress in colorful finery and assemble his punch bowl “in the manner of a conjuror producing strange articles from a hat.”

One of his concoctions was so well-received that a guest wrote to Dickens, begging for the recipe. “It was one of those letters that is obviously a follow-up to a party,” Frizell says. “Like if someone says, ‘Oh, my God, that dip was so good. Can you send me the recipe?’”

The author obliged, and the surviving 1847 letter provides an easy-to-follow roadmap for drinking like Dickens: Begin with a bowl of lemon peels, sugar, rum, and brandy, then set it ablaze for several minutes. After extinguishing, add lemon juice and boiling water, then set it aside to rest.

“For some reason, just letting it sit for five minutes really lets the flavors coalesce,” Frizell says. The mixture also keeps well—so well that Frizell once bottled and sold bottles of Dickens Punch from his restaurant. “You could bring it home, heat it up, and serve it right out of the bottle. People loved it.”

Though it starts out strong, most of the alcohol burns off, leaving the punch with a pleasant potency. Everyone at my party had second helpings.

In his letter, Dickens promised his friend that the “tremendous” recipe would “make you for ninety years (I hope) a beautiful Punchmaker.” With my own bottle of leftovers awaiting my next party, I can’t help but feel like a beautiful Punchmaker too.

The Challenge: Café Brûlot

While I love a good flaming drink, I’ll admit I was nervous about lighting myself/my kitchen on fire. And the recipe that intimidated me the most was café brûlot, the drink that started Frizell’s lifelong love of fiery beverages.

It’s almost a tradition for flames to dance upon the tablecloths at some New Orleans restaurants. In the hands of skilled mixologists, Frizell notes, “the flames on the table can be part of the fun.” While I’m happy to report that there were no major fires at my party, there wasn’t much fire overall when I made my café brûlot. In fact, my booze-soaked orange peel failed to stay lit for more than a few seconds.

When I checked in with Frizell, he knew my mistake immediately: I forgot to heat up my booze first. “What I’ve learned, and I always say to people, is that the alcohol in your bowl needs to be warm before you get started,” he explained later. “You can’t go in there with room temperature alcohol. It has to be at least about 120°F to even have a chance at letting it get on fire.”

Armed with some warmed cognac and Cointreau, I tried again. As I ladled the flaming booze down my spiraled orange peel, I knew I’d nailed it. It was a gorgeous display. I wouldn’t say the drink was my favorite, but that’s probably because I’m a black-coffee purist and rarely enjoy my brew with any additions. For presentation points alone, however, I’d highly recommend trying to make café brûlot once.

The Show Stopper: The Blue Blazer

In his book Imbibe!, David Wondrich relays a potential origin story of the Blue Blazer cocktail. It’s likely apocryphal, but it’s too good to ignore. During the Gold Rush, a hardy miner walked into a saloon in San Francisco, seeking something strong. “Barkeep, fix me up some hellfire that’ll shake me right down to my gizzard,” he said.

Behind the bar was none other than famed mixologist Jerry Thomas. According to the story, Thomas set some whiskey and boiling water ablaze, then proceeded to pour it back and forth between two cups, creating an entrancing thread of blue flames. Adding some sugar and a lemon peel, he set the drink before the gentleman, who drank it down and choked out with satisfaction: “Yes, sir, right down to my gizzard!”

Thomas didn’t actually invent the Blue Blazer, but he was responsible for popularizing it. In fact, one of the main portraits we have of the 19th-century bartender is an illustration of him masterfully pouring flames between mugs.

It makes sense that the Blazer is one of Thomas’s claims to fame: It’s a surprisingly simple cocktail with style and substance. The drink just calls for high-proof whisky (I used Bruichladdich), raw sugar, hot water, and lemon. Plus, the resulting elixir is delightful. Think of it as a glam-rock hot toddy.

“Blue Blazers are delicious,” Frizell says, noting that the magic ingredient in the bare-bones recipe is the fire itself. “When you apply fire, the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s hard to scientifically define, but something happens and it just makes things taste so much better.”

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