Flip Out by Putting a Whole Egg in Your Cocktail
Eggs and booze go way back.
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For almost as long as there have been cocktails, there have been eggs in cocktails—and not just the egg whites that add a creamy, foamy, textured top to shaken drinks like the Pisco Sour. The earliest cocktail manuals included recipes for numerous drinks that include whole eggs.
In his seminal 1800s-era cocktail book, The Bartender's Guide—the first cocktail book ever published—pathbreaking bartender Jerry Thomas included multiple entries on "flips," a category of drink that uses whole eggs. In some cases, these were hot drinks, like the Ale Flip. The Ale Flip used an iron poker heated in a fire to make scalding beer, which was then mixed with eggs, producing a sort of fried egg beer that's especially welcome during cold weather.
Other historic riffs on the concept, like the Cold Rum Flip, merely called for mixing a whole raw egg with sugar and rum, producing a thick, rich, satisfyingly sweet, dessert-like cocktail that drinks like boozy cake batter.
As craft cocktail bartenders have rediscovered pre-Prohibition cocktails and drink-making techniques, flips have found their way back onto bar menus at high-end, novelty-focused bars. Most have consisted of simple combinations of sugar, egg, and booze—often rum, sherry, or brandy, the spirits of choice when Thomas was slinging drink.
Some of the spirits now mixed with egg, however, have become more adventurous. A flip made with Cynar—a bittersweet Italian liqueur with an earthy, vegetal flavor (there's an illustration of an artichoke on the label)—produces an unexpectedly tasty result that drinks something like a Negroni crossed with cookie dough.
The only flip to earn modern classic status, in the sense that it has found its way to bar menus across the world over many years, is a drink called the Death Flip, from bartender Chris Hysted-Adams in Melbourne, Australia.
The Death Flip combines a whole egg with tequila, herbal yellow Chartreuse, and Jägermeister, the latter two of which are sufficiently sweet to replace the sugar included in earlier recipes. It's a patently bizarre cocktail, with a provocative name designed to make drinking it seem like a dare or a stunt. It's strange and bitter, but it goes down easy, like a novelty candy.
Not all flips are so ostentatiously odd. If you've had homemade eggnog, well, that's just a species of flip, with some cream added to the mix. The difference between a flip and a nog is just the presence of milk or cream, but they're both drink types defined by the presence of whole eggs.
Inevitably, the use of whole raw eggs has raised health concerns, and local government authorities have taken notice.
In 2010, as the craft cocktail boom was switching into high gear, New York City attempted to crack down—pun intended—on the use of whole eggs in cocktails, warning that raw eggs sometimes contain salmonella.
But salmonella infections are rare (just one in 20,000 eggs, according to the American Egg Board), and the presence of alcohol can help mitigate any raw-egg-related dangers—with higher proof booze more likely to kill bacteria, especially in lightly aged nogs. Those who are still worried, meanwhile, can always pasteurize their eggs, or buy them pre-pasteurized.
But it's worth remembering that when these drinks were invented, that wasn't an option. A Cold Rum Flip just used the everyday eggs of the late 1800s—and a century and a half later, the results remain truly delicious, perhaps even eggs-celent. Try an egg in your drink. You might just flip out.
