Advocaat with Whiskey

Egg Liqueur with Whisky by Piekfeine Brände on single malt

Egg Liqueur with Whisky by Piekfeine Brände is a creamy egg liqueur made from organic egg yolks, into which the house's own VAN LOON single malt is stirred. The whisky lays smoke and wood beneath the vanilla, turning a Sunday drink into a liqueur for the evening.

Egg Liqueur with Whisky is the egg liqueur from Piekfeine Brände in Bremen, made by Birgitta Schulze van Loon from organic egg yolks and her own single malt. No cream goes in; the egg yolk alone provides the binding – 25% ABV, 350 ml, deep yellow.

Vanilla creaminess under a quiet smoke

First you taste what everyone expects from egg liqueur: thick, sweet, vanilla-like, with the rich tone of fresh egg yolk.

Then the whisky comes in and turns things around. It brings wood, a little smoke, and a spicy sharpness that runs through the creaminess like a dark thread. What remains is a liqueur that is creamy, smoky, and strong at once, and rarely stays alone after the first glass.

This combination is no gimmick but a natural fit: vanilla and cask spice are already neighbors in the whisky itself. The egg yolk does little more than hold the two together.

How thick a liqueur like this becomes is decided by the amount of egg yolk alone. The law requires at least 140 g per liter, and anyone who wants to stay below that has to resort to thickeners. Nobody resorts to thickeners here.

Over ice, in punch, on ladyfingers

Well chilled and poured over an ice cube, it gets to the point most honestly, without a cream topping and without trimmings.

With vanilla ice cream it is the obvious choice, in a winter egg punch it is the key ingredient, and anyone making tiramisu soaks the ladyfingers in it instead of coffee liqueur. The liqueur likes sweet things, but it can also handle bitter ones: poured over a dark chocolate cake, the whisky stands up to the bitterness.

As a gift it works where the well-behaved Sunday version would fall short – with people, in other words, who otherwise drink whisky and don't care much for yellow liqueurs. If you like the whisky neat, you'll find it again in the Caramel Whisky Liqueur.

Organic egg yolk instead of cream, whisky instead of flavoring

The ingredient list reads organic egg yolk from the region, alcohol, single malt whisky, and sugar – nothing more is needed.

Birgitta Schulze van Loon emphasizes it as a principle of her house that the liqueurs contain the distillery's own distillates instead of bought-in neutral alcohol. Here this principle costs particularly dearly, because a single malt aged three years is more expensive than any industrial alcohol.

The distiller deliberately does without emulsifiers and without flavorings or colorings, which you can see in the bottle: small orange specks float in the liqueur, and some sediment may settle at the bottom. Both are signs of real eggs rather than stabilized industrial goods. Shake it vigorously once, and everything is back in place.

The whisky for it is VAN LOON, which Birgitta Schulze van Loon has been distilling herself since 2015 and leaves to mature in the cask for three years before it is allowed into the mixing bowl. Unopened, the liqueur keeps for at least 3 years; once the bottle is open, it should be finished within 6 months. You can find the entire range at Piekfeine Brände, and the fruity sister is called Egg Liqueur with Elderberry Brandy.