There’s a line often attributed to author Dorothy Parker: “I hate writing, I love having written.” Anyone who has made orgeat to use in cocktails probably came away feeling similarly. The most common process to make this rich and nutty, softly floral almond-based syrup is, quite frankly, messy, slow, and tedious. Recipes usually call for toasting or blanching almonds (the sweet variety found in most stores, not bitter almonds for safety reasons), then crushing them into a near-powder that’s macerated in simple syrup before the solids are removed by passing the mixture through a nut bag or fine strainer. And I hope you are the patient type, because a good maceration is best left to do its thing for hours, if not days.
But the tedium is instantly worth it once you’re easing into a mesmerizing mai tai, the tiki drink that’s most synonymous with the centuries-old sweetener. It’s a dilemma faced by professional and amateur bartenders alike: Orgeat is indispensable, but should I go through the trouble to DIY it, or buy it? (Quality commercial versions tend to run you around $2 per ounce.) The choice may no longer be as binary as that. A hack that considerably speeds up the at-home orgeat-making process has been surfacing online, in which nary an almond is burnt, blanched, pulverized or choked by cheesecloth—at least not by you. Instead, you reach for store-bought, unsweetened almond milk as the basis for the syrup, skipping the long extraction. But is this method any good? We had to investigate.
Orgeat (pronounced or-zhat) originated in France. The word has nothing to do with almonds. “Orge” means barley in French, and the earliest orgeat was sweetened barley water, which was used by bakers as a longer-lasting milk alternative before the advent of refrigeration. At some point the French began making their orgeat with more and more almond oil, to improve the taste, and eventually phased out the barley entirely. (Interestingly, the “horch-” in horchata also connotes barley, suggesting that that beverage also at some point parted ways with the humble grain in favor of tastier ingredients.) Orange flower water and rose water were subsequent add-ons to enhance the orgeat’s complexity of flavor.
One of orgeat’s earliest recorded uses in a mixed drink is in the Japanese cocktail—essentially a cognac old-fashioned sweetened with orgeat rather than plain sugar—a drink that appears in “Professor’’ Jerry Thomas’s bartending manual from the 1860s. During and after Prohibition, more cocktails with orgeat were introduced, including Cameron’s Kick and the Army & Navy (more on the latter later).
The postwar flourishing of tiki, particularly through the popularity of Trader Vic’s, further raised orgeat’s profile. Victor Bergeron, the founder of Trader Vic’s, cemented orgeat as a quintessential tiki-drink component thanks to drinks he helped popularize, like the mai tai, fog cutter, and scorpion bowl.
According to Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, a tiki historian and bar owner, “When Don the Beachcomber”—a.k.a. Donn Beach, another forerunner of tiki culture—“wanted an almond taste in his drinks in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, he would just use a few drops of almond extract, like two or three drops.” Bergeron, on the other hand, was likely familiar with orgeat because he had French Canadian roots through his father, Berry says. Choosing orgeat when he wanted to imbue his drinks with a nutty, aromatic sweetness probably was more intuitive for him than reaching for almond extract. Before developing his own proprietary orgeat recipe to serve in cocktails at Trader Vic’s and later sell commercially, Bergeron used a French-made orgeat from the label Garnier, Berry says. The Trader Vic’s formulation became the benchmark, at least for tiki cocktails.
“If you want to know what the almond component of the original mai tai tasted like, that’s where you start,” Berry says of the Trader Vic’s orgeat; it’s noticeably dense and rich and almond-forward. “It does what it needs to do, which is to make the mai tai not just a rum margarita.”
At Berry’s New Orleans tiki bar, Latitude 29, the orgeat is decidedly not made in-house. “I don’t know why anybody bothers to make orgeat,” Berry says, “it’s a huge pain in the ass!” For all of Latitude 29’s orgeat needs, Berry relies on Adam Kolesar, the one-person operation behind Orgeat Works, a Brooklyn-based supplier of handmade orgeat, as well as syrups based on ingredients like macadamia nut and sesame seed. Orgeat Works sells a traditional, Vic’s-esque orgeat made with blanched almonds, which Kolesar says is more marzipan-like, and a toasted almond orgeat, which has a much more natural almond profile.
Kolesar’s approach is to do days-long macerations of almonds in syrup, and clarify the product for a less cloudy solution. “My manufacturing process certainly has evolved,” says Kolesar, who started Orgeat Works in the mid-2000s, “but the one thing that is constant is time…The whole key to deriving flavor from whatever nut you’re using is: give it time.” Sugar’s propensity to draw out flavors must be left to do its work.
That brings us back to the almond milk hack. Mentions of this workaround have appeared online on tiki message boards and home-cooking blogs since at least as far back as the early 2000s. The cocktails-focused YouTube channels Make and Drink and Steve the Bartender have explored the subject, producing their own recipes and even taste-testing them against commercial brands. Jamie Boudreau of the celebrated Seattle cocktail bar Canon is a notable pro adoptee. But how could a time-saving workaround perform well, I wondered, when time is a crucial piece in the puzzle of a great orgeat? I decided to try the approach myself, using store-bought almond milk as the liquid base on which to build a syrup that’s lightly flavored with orange flower water and rose water.
What I found in my testing is that saving time indeed sacrifices depth, but you can still come away with a pleasing orgeat that works unquestionably better than other shortcuts such as subbing in amaretto or almond extract. As Kolesar put it, “I don’t think the product really compares. But it gets you in the neighborhood.”
To amp up the almond milk orgeat’s richness without being too heavy-handed with sugar, I found that a split of white and dark sugars, in a 1:1 ratio with the almond milk, worked well. Adding a touch of almond extract led to a fuller almond flavor, and fortifying the syrup with dry orange curaçao helped to enunciate the orgeat’s orange dimension.
In a big, crowded tiki drink, almond milk orgeat may not show through with the same prominence as one made with well-extracted almonds. (If you prefer the almond notes of your tiki drinks to be subtle, this could be a good thing.) But that’s not the only way in which to judge—and use—easy orgeat. There are countless other drinks in the cocktail canon that call for the almond syrup. The Army & Navy, a delicate gin sour that first appears in print in David Embury’s 1948 cocktail book, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, is an ideal candidate for this easy version. The simplicity of this drink, composed of just gin, lemon, orgeat, and bitters, is its advantage, because each element has its space to occupy. The flavors don’t come across crowded or muddled. Unadorned gin sours are often too nakedly acidic for me, whereas the orgeat in an Army & Navy tames the lemon and complements the botanicals of the gin. (A traditional London Dry is nice to use here.) It’s a much more even-tempered cocktail than, say, the gin gimlet, and the easy orgeat does everything you need it to do.
High-quality commercial orgeats like those from Orgeat Works, Liber & Co., and Small Hand Foods need not lose sleep over an easy orgeat insurgency. But when you don’t have hours (let alone days) to devote to a DIY orgeat, starting with almond milk will get you where you want to be. In minutes you’ll have cocktail in hand, and no crushed nuts to clean up afterward.
