Two More Easy Bndictine Old Fashioned Variations
For the last month or so, we’ve been looking at simple Old Fashioned-style cocktails made with sweet liqueurs at a 4:1 (spirit:liqueur) ratio.
Those drinks include the Rusty Nail, the Cooper Union, and several variations on the Monte Carlo.
These drinks comprise a lesser-known subcategory of cocktails that sits somewhere between the Manhattan and the Old Fashioned — the Liqueur-Sweetened Old Fashioned, or LSOF.
Because they require no homemade ingredients or difficult techniques, LSOFs are quite easy to make once you’ve gathered the requisite bottles, making them excellent make-at-home cocktails. And because they rely on sweeteners with unusual flavors, they are quite complex in taste.
LSOFS are sneaky cheater’s drinks you can use to impress your friends (or yourself!) — without much work.
After this week, we’ll take a break from cocktails in this style. My crystal ball shows Manhattans and Martinis and shaken summer drinks in our future. But drinks in this family are so easy to make and so consistently delightful — delicious, interesting, layered with flavors — that I want to look at two more before we move on.
The first one takes the same split base/dual spirit Monte Carlo structure we saw in the Jacko’s End and the El Camino and applies it to apple brandy and peaty Islay Scotch.
The second one stretches the concept somewhat by altering — or at least maybe altering? more on that in a moment — the underlying 4:1 ratio to make the cocktail a little less sweet. It cuts the Bénédictine, bringing the spirit:liqueur balance down to 8:1, making for a boozier, punchier version of this sort of drink.
Conveniently, both of this week’s drinks are made from ingredients we use regularly in this newsletter — rye whiskey, apple brandy, Islay Scotch, and Bénédictine. They’re delicious, easy, interesting cocktails you can make with bottles you might already have on your bar cart.
The Jacko’s End is one of my favorite lesser-known cocktails. It combines the smoky friction of mezcal with the cool-weather comforts of quality American apply brandy, and then balances the two base spirits the herbal-sweet Bénédictine. It all comes together with a couple dashes of fruity, bitter Peychaud’s bitters.
This week’s first drink takes that same idea and asks a question that is almost always worth asking: What if, instead of mezcal, it was made with aggressive Islay Scotch?
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