Sips & Synopsis
This Weeks Makings.
Halloween is Saturday. Early Sunday morning the clocks fall back an hour, and by Monday it's dark by the time most of us start dinner.
You get one extra hour of sleep out of the deal. Then you get four months of evenings that start early.
The first dark week calls for a drink you hold with both hands. The Hot Toddy is whiskey, honey, lemon, and hot water in a warm mug. It takes three minutes and a kettle, and there's a good chance everything you need is already in your kitchen.
In this week's newsletter:
The Hot Toddy, and the one step most people skip
How to build any hot drink so it stays hot and tastes balanced
Two bonus cocktails, one rum and one mezcal
A multiple choice trivia question about where the word toddy comes from
A zero proof toddy built on black tea and fresh ginger
Trivia Question❓
Long before it meant hot whiskey with honey and lemon, the word toddy named a different drink. Which one?
A. A Scottish barley broth
B. A drink made from fermented palm sap
C. A Dutch gin punch
D. A warm spiced cider from England
Answer at the bottom of the newsletter
Hot Toddy
Whiskey, honey, and lemon stretched with hot water in a warm mug. Soft, a little tart, and done in three minutes.
Ingredients
1.5 oz bourbon, rye, or blended Scotch
0.5 oz honey
0.5 oz fresh lemon juice
4 oz hot water, about a minute off the boil
1 lemon wheel studded with 3 or 4 whole cloves
1 cinnamon stick (optional)
Directions
Fill a heatproof mug with hot water from the kettle and let it sit for a minute to warm the mug
Pour the water out
Add the honey and about 1 oz of the hot water. Stir until the honey dissolves
Add the whiskey and the lemon juice
Top with the rest of the hot water and stir once
Float the clove-studded lemon wheel on top. Add the cinnamon stick if you're using it
Why It Works
Warm the mug first. A cold ceramic mug pulls the heat out of the drink, and a toddy that's lukewarm by the third sip tastes flat and boozy. Dissolve the honey in a splash of hot water before the whiskey goes in, or it sits at the bottom in a cold lump. Keep the water a minute off the boil so you can sip it right away. Bourbon makes it rounder and sweeter. Rye adds spice. Blended Scotch gives you the Scottish version.
Behind the Bar - Hot Drinks
A hot cocktail follows the same rules as a cold one. Spirit, sweet, sour, and water. The difference is that the water arrives hot and all at once instead of melting off the ice.
The ratio runs about 1 part spirit to 2 or 3 parts hot water. Less water and it tastes like warm whiskey. More and it tastes like weak tea.
How to keep it hot:
Preheat the mug every time. Fill it from the kettle, wait a minute, pour it out.
Use a thick ceramic mug or a heatproof glass mug with a handle. Thin glass loses heat fast and gets too hot to hold.
Dissolve honey or sugar in a little hot water first. Cold honey won't mix into anything.
Add the lemon a little at a time and taste. Too much and it tastes like cold medicine.
The template underneath:
Spirit, honey, lemon, hot water, and a spice you can smell. Swap the whiskey for aged rum or brandy and keep everything else. Swap the water for hot apple cider and you're close to a mulled drink. Swap the honey and lemon for a spoonful of spiced butter and you've got one of this week's bonus drinks.
A few tools that help:
Bonus Cocktails
Two more this week. One warm and one cold, one rum and one mezcal, and no whiskey in either.
Hot Buttered Rum
Aged rum, a spoonful of spiced brown sugar butter, and hot water. Rich, warm, and close to dessert.
Ingredients
2 oz aged rum
1 heaping tablespoon spiced butter batter (below)
4 oz hot water
Whole nutmeg to grate on top
For the batter, mash 4 tablespoons of softened butter with 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg, a pinch of ground cloves, and a pinch of salt. That's enough for about 6 drinks. Keep it covered in the fridge for up to a week.
Directions
Warm a mug with hot water and pour it out. Add the batter and about 2 oz of the hot water and stir until the butter melts. Add the rum, top with the rest of the hot water, and stir again. Grate a little nutmeg over the top.
Why it works
Hot buttered rum goes back to colonial America, when families kept their own recipes. Jerry Thomas printed a hot spiced rum in his 1862 How to Mix Drinks with Jamaica rum, sugar, cloves, allspice, butter, and hot water, and Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide later carried a batter version (the record is here). Mixing the butter with the sugar and spice before it hits the mug helps it melt evenly. Use an aged rum, because a white rum gets lost under the butter. Stir before every few sips. Butter floats.
Naked and Famous
Mezcal, yellow Chartreuse, Aperol, and lime in equal parts. Smoky, bright, a little bitter, and shaken cold.
Ingredients
0.75 oz mezcal
0.75 oz yellow Chartreuse
0.75 oz Aperol
0.75 oz fresh lime juice
Directions
Add everything to a shaker with ice. Shake hard for about 12 seconds. Strain into a chilled coupe. No garnish.
Why it works
Joaquín Simó made it at Death & Co in New York in 2011, and he described it as the love child of the Last Word and the Paper Plane, conceived in the mountains of Oaxaca (the story is here). Both of those drinks are equal parts, and so is this one. The Paper Plane was our Drink of the Week back in February. If you bought yellow Chartreuse for the Widow's Kiss a few weeks ago, here's a second use for the bottle. Día de los Muertos falls on Sunday and Monday, and a mezcal drink suits the weekend. Use a joven mezcal that you'd sip on its own.
“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”
Mocktail or Zero Proof Option
The Zero Proof Toddy
Strong black tea and fresh ginger stand in for the whiskey. Same honey, same lemon, same warm mug.
Ingredients
5 oz strong black tea, hot (or rooibos if you want it caffeine free)
0.5 oz honey
0.5 oz fresh lemon juice
3 thin slices of fresh ginger
1 lemon wheel studded with cloves
1 cinnamon stick (optional)
Directions
Steep the tea with the ginger slices for 4 minutes, then take out the tea bag and leave the ginger in. Warm a mug with hot water and pour it out. Add the honey and stir in the hot tea and ginger until the honey dissolves. Add the lemon juice. Float the clove-studded lemon wheel on top and add the cinnamon stick if you're using it.
Whiskey brings heat and a little bite. The ginger covers the heat and strong tea covers the bite, so the drink tastes grown up instead of like hot lemonade. The ginger keeps steeping in the mug, so the last sips are the spiciest.
💡 Answer to Trivia Question:
B. A drink made from fermented palm sap.
English writers picked up the word in the early 1600s, spelled tarrie and then taddy, from the Hindi tari, meaning palm sap. That comes from tar, the word for palm tree. By 1761 toddy also meant liquor mixed with hot water, sugar, and spices, which is the drink we know today (the word history is here).
🏁 Closing Time
Halloween is Saturday, and the clocks go back Sunday. Put the extra hour to use.
Sunday evening, before it gets dark, put the kettle on, warm a mug, and make a toddy. Then leave the honey jar next to the kettle. You'll be making these until March.
Until next week,
Andrea
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This content is intended for readers of legal drinking age and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. Please drink responsibly.
