Recommended The Bar-Tender's Guide by Jerry Thomas (1862, p.64) — Jerry Thomas 1862
| 4 oz | rum — rum | base |
| 8 oz | ale — ale or beer | other |
| Mixed spice — spices | other | |
| sugar — sugar | sweetener |
- Combine rum with warm ale or beer, or with water if malt liquor is unavailable.
- Sweeten and spice to taste.
- Pour the drink repeatedly between two vessels to produce the smoothness essential to a good flip.
- Nose
- Warm malt, spirit, and spice rise together in a broad, comforting aroma.
- Palate
- The palate is soft, warming, and rounded, with the repeated pouring creating a texture closer to froth than to a plain hot mixed drink.
- Finish
- It finishes hot, mellow, and gently spiced.
- Summary
- A pre-cocktail warming drink whose identity lies as much in texture as in flavour.
Thomas treats flip as an established older family rather than as a modern cocktail-era novelty. His emphasis on smoothness, repeated pouring, and warming malt-and-spirit service places it in a deeper Anglo-American drinking tradition than the newer cocktail families.
The key is not mere mixing but aeration and smoothing. Thomas makes clear that repeated transfer between vessels is what turns the drink from a rough hot mixture into a proper flip.
This first rum flip definition serves as the conceptual base for the fuller egg-enriched flips that follow. It is useful to think of it as the family's skeletal form.