The Best Way To Reheat A Hot Butter Bourbon Cocktail For A Second Round

Nothing warms the soul like a hot buttered cocktail, a cozy treat balancing dessert-inspired richness with a kick of booze. Hot buttered rum, a wintertime staple in America since the 18th century, is always a classic, but there's a fresh twist in the hot buttered bourbon cocktail, swapping rum out for smoky, woody, vanilla, and caramel notes that work perfectly with the tipple's butter and baking spices. Making it is simple — just combine spiced butter with bourbon, boiling water, and your garnishes — but there is one tricky thing to figure out with hot buttered rum. You often make it in a batch when entertaining, so how do you reheat any leftovers from that batch for future servings?

You can keep hot buttered bourbon leftovers safe and tasty in the fridge for up to three days in an airtight container. If it's still in a pitcher, just ensure you cover it well with plastic wrap. Whenever you serve the cocktail, it should be kept warm for the duration of the evening in a slow cooker; when it comes to warming it back up after it's been refrigerated, you need to stir it up a bit to bring the texture and incorporation of ingredients back to perfection. Pour it into a saucepan over medium heat and gently whisk repeatedly to get the butter melted and blended back into the bourbon. In a few minutes, you'll have hot buttered bourbon as good as the day you made it.

An alternative to reheating hot buttered bourbon cocktails is to not have any leftovers at all, which means you won't be making these in a batch. This is easier than it sounds, even if you've got a big group, and could be the way to go if you don't know how many people will actually drink the hot buttered bourbon or how much — while the reheating process is pretty effortless, you could skip it altogether. 

The secret lies in the spiced butter, which is handily something you can make ahead of time and keep in the fridge for up to a few weeks if it's in an airtight container. Once you have the container of butter paste, you can go mug by mug when serving the cocktail — just pop a tablespoon of the butter into the bottom of the mug, pour in the bourbon and hot water, and stir. The spiced butter is the only more time-consuming part of the process, so if you have that done, this can be a more spontaneous serving. To make it, you blend softened butter with pumpkin pie spice and brown sugar. You could also customize this with any spices you want, really. Instead of pumpkin pie spice, individually incorporate cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and ground cloves — you can even add some spice with cardamom or heat with ginger, or dial up the sweetness by making a spiced honey butter.