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" Welcome to Eat Like a Man&amp;#039;s 2012 Holiday Survival Guide, wherein we tackle some of the season&amp;#039;s thorniest issues in food and drink to help you make it to January in one piece. You&amp;#039;re either for nog or you&amp;#039;re against it. There is no middle ground. It all comes down to how you feel about drinking your bourbon or rum in a pool of melted ice cream, because that&amp;#039;s more or less what eggnog is: eggs, sugar, cream, nutmeg, and vanilla. It&amp;#039;s an ice-cream base masquerading as a cocktail mixer. It helps that nog has history on its side. It&amp;#039;s a drink born in medieval England, made popular in early America, which now lives in our collective imagination as a symbol of a bygone time when men were men, women were women, and people could take down a concoction of hard alcohol, refined sugar, and animal fat without the hideous stamp of modern guilt. The best eggnog is always that which you make from scratch, but if you&amp;#039;re going to opt for a store-bought version, you would do well to choose carefully. All nogs are not created equal, as I recently discovered when I sampled eight popular brands. What follows is my appraisal of the field. (Note that all of these eggnogs are sold in non-alcoholic form; you can do the spiking with a booze of your choosing at home.)  Scent: Most nogs didn&amp;#039;t give off much of a bouquet, with the exception of Rice Dream&amp;#039;s Rice Nog ($2), which smelled of new My Little Pony dolls. Appearance: Generally speaking, the nogs were a neutral, inoffensive shade of off-white. Demerits go to Rice Nog, which looked like filthy water, and Lactaid Eggnog ($2.99), for its weirdly bright-yellow hue (perhaps over-compensation for a brand name that sounds more like a female nursing tool than a festive holiday beverage). Ronnybrook Eggnog ($4.79) was also a little unsettlingly yellow.   Texture: Most of the nogs suffered from being too thick, due to the fact that dairy companies crudely try to replicate the luscious texture of whipped eggs by doctoring their heavy cream with guar gum and carrageenan. This results in a slimy, Pepto Bismal consistency. Southern Comfort Eggnog ($3.99) set itself apart by recalling instead the grittiness of Mylanta. Points to Organic Valley ($4.99)for finding the proper level of thickness. The brand doesn&amp;#039;t use guar gum, and the resulting nog is hefty without being mouth-coating.   Nutrition: Eggnog is irredeemable from a nutritional standpoint. Period. The pre-packaged stuff is mostly made from high-fructose corn syrup, dairy fat, and a bunch of unlovable additives. Rice Nog and Horizon Organic Eggnog ($4) were notably lighter in fat and calories than the others, if you keep track of such things. Let&amp;#039;s all agree that there&amp;#039;s a two-drink maximum on eggnog and inquire no further into the exact composition of the stuff.  Flavor: I found Southern Comfort, Lactaid, Ronnybrook, and Farmland Dairies ($2.49) to be middling nogs, tooth-achingly sweet, and with flavors in the vanilla pudding and butterscotch categories. Horizon Organic tasted of bubblegum; Holiday Eggnog ($2.49), the worst of the bunch, had a distinct turpentine finish. Rice Nog, as one might expect, wasn&amp;#039;t a true nog so much as rice milk half-heartedly flavored with pie spices. The stand-out in the group was Organic Valley, which tasted of nutmeg and fresh cream, and wasn&amp;#039;t nearly so sweet as the other brands. I suspect this is because the company skipped the corn syrup and instead used organic fair-trade cane sugar.  Winner: By a landslide, Organic Valley, for its pure nutmeg taste, moderate sweetness, clean texture, and an all-organic ingredient list that proved less horrifying than its competitors. HOLIDAYS 2012: Hacks, Recipes, and Wisdom on Eat Like a Man &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/a17116/best-eggnog-brands-taste-test-14817569/>