Christmas cocktails add warmth, happiness, and festive colour

It’s a couple of hours before service at Ronin , the Sheung Wan izakaya, and beverage director Elliot Faber is folding washcloths as he chats with a visitor about his favourite holiday drinks.

“Do you [know] Raphael Holzer?” he asks. Holzer is one of the men behind Fernet Hunter, an amaro made in Austria for the Hong Kong market. “His family makes what they call Holzer Tea. They sent it to him from Austria in a recycled Pepsi bottle. We stand outside in the cold, he warms it up and puts in some spices. It’s the best.” That’s exactly what a good Christmas cocktail should evoke: warmth, happiness, a bit of colour in spirit, if not in glass. And luckily for those without a connection to the Holzer family, plenty of Hong Kong bars will serve special winter concoctions this month.

Wan Chai Spanish restaurant The Optimist will ring in the season with the Canela, a blend of Wild Turkey bourbon, cinnamon syrup, red wine and lime juice, topped with egg white and flambéed marshmallows. In Repulse Bay, Limewood’s Rye & Candy brings together rye whiskey, apple chutney, cloudy apple juice, winter spices and pine. The North Pole, at Kennedy Town pizza bar Alvy’s, is the liquid equivalent of a warm blanket, with maple vodka, home-made chocolate syrup, heavy cream and ginger.

“Christmas is about sharing with family and friends,” says Axel Adriel González, manager of the intimate Upstairs Bar at Belon. This month, the candlelit hideaway is serving a holiday punch in vintage metal bowls. “It’s rum based, with almond syrup, star anise, cardamom, cinnamon, orange peel and spice liqueur,” says González. If you are not a fan of the Diplomatico rum that comes standard, you can swap it out for another spirit. “The punch base goes with gin, vodka or Scotch.”

At Room One in the Mira Hotel, mixologist Rocky Rai is putting a spin on holiday classics with three new cocktails, all of them served warm. His version of the hot toddy adds a bit of spectacle.

“People drink first with their eyes,” he says. That was something understood by pioneering 19th-century bartender Jerry Thomas, whose signature Blue Blazer was the world’s first flaming cocktail. Made with Zacapa and high-proof Bacardi 151 rum, as well as Bénédictine, mint, lemon juice and ginger honey, Rai’s toddy is lit on fire and passed between two silver mugs to form a continuous stream of blue fire. Thomas described it as “a nectar for Pluto rather than Bacchus” in his 1862 recipe book, How to Mix Drinks.

“It’s very fun to watch,” says Rai. He says it was inspired by two instances from his childhood. “When I was small, whenever I got caught up with a cold, my grandmother would mix up a hot drink with cinnamon,” he says. And the fire evokes the flair of bartending that captured his imagination when he was growing up in a Nepalese family in Hong Kong. “When I was small, I saw Tom Cruise flaming cocktails in Cocktail,” the kitschy 1988 blockbuster. “I thought, ‘I want to do this’.”

What Rai’s other two cocktails lack in fire, they make up for in winter warmth. The Wintery Pie includes Jameson whisky, Chartreuse, lemon bitters, hot apple cider, lemon juice, sugar and a house mix of cloves, cardamom, cinnamon and star anise. Rum & Butter makes use of Kraken spiced rum, Applejack (a distilled apple cider), lemon juice, honey and anise seed butter.