Making Your Own Orgeat

The almond syrup that makes or breaks a Mai Tai, and why the supermarket version won't do.

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Orgeat is an almond syrup with a hint of orange flower water, and it is the single ingredient most responsible for whether a Mai Tai tastes like a Mai Tai or like a rum sour with some sweetener in it.

Most commercially available orgeat is almond-flavored sugar water. No actual almonds, no texture, no length. It’ll make a drink that’s technically correct and completely flat.

What good orgeat does

Real orgeat brings three things. Sweetness, obviously. But also body — the emulsified almond oil gives a drink a silky weight that sugar alone can’t produce. And a nutty, faintly floral length that lingers after the citrus has cleared.

Once you’ve had a Mai Tai made with the real thing, the difference isn’t subtle and you can’t go back.

The method, in outline

  1. Toast raw almonds lightly. This is optional and controversial; it pushes the flavor darker and nuttier. Skip it if you want something more delicate.
  2. Grind and steep. Blitz the almonds, cover with hot water, and let them sit for several hours. You’re making almond milk.
  3. Strain hard. Through a nut milk bag or several layers of cheesecloth, and squeeze. What you want is the liquid, and you want all of it.
  4. Add sugar — roughly two parts sugar to one part almond milk by weight for a rich syrup. Warm gently to dissolve; don’t boil.
  5. Finish with a small amount of orange flower water and a splash of overproof rum or brandy. The orange flower is easy to overdo — start with less than you think.

The rum isn’t for flavor. It’s a preservative. Fresh orgeat with no alcohol will turn in under a week.

If you’re not going to make it

That’s a completely reasonable choice. Several small producers make genuine almond orgeat and ship it, and a good bought orgeat beats a bad homemade one. The thing to check is the ingredient list. If almonds aren’t near the top, put the bottle back.

The broader point applies to every syrup in an exotic cocktail. These drinks have a lot of moving parts, and the parts that aren’t the rum are doing more work than people assume. Passion fruit, falernum, cinnamon syrup, Martinique sugarcane syrup — each one is a decision, not a filler.