While it’s always fun to share tasting notes on whatever bottles of whiskey I feel like dusting off and trying, to me, the fun of it is about more than just sipping and sniffing at straight liquor. You’ve got to make some drinks with it as well. And as we’re heading into proper Fall weather and beyond that, lamentably, is winter weather, I figured it was only right and proper to debut The Current Hot Toddy for 2021.
In general, I’m not a Hot Toddy fanatic by any stretch of the imagination and I don’t really have a single go-to recipe featuring ingredients and preferred proportions of bourbon and lemon juice, tea, and/or honey, but I know I’ve made different recipes over the years and this year is truly delightful. This is what I came up with:
One bottle Jim Beam Orange
Local honey (or any honey really, but our source for local honey hooks us up with the best honey)
Twining’s Orange & Cinnamon Spice Tea (I suppose any Orange & Cinnamon Spice Tea would work, but I used Twining’s for whatever reason.)
Boiling water (obviously!)
I think the tea came first. I don’t know why, it was more of an impulse buy than anything else. It was one of the first colder days of the season and orange cinnamon just sounded good. Once I had that, suddenly Jim Beam Orange seemed like a perfect complement if I was looking to make a hot toddy and the rest of the formula flowed from there. Soon enough, I had a recipe:
1 oz Jim Beam Orange
1 tablespoon of local honey (or 1 teaspoon if you want less honey and not more.)
1 teabag of Twining’s Orange & Cinnamon Spice Tea
Top it off with freshly boiling water
Brew/steep tea for a few minutes, remove the teabag and then stir.
Enjoy!
If you like to feel the kick of the booze in your hot toddy, this may not be the recipe for you. The orange of tea combines with the Jim Beam Orange more or less perfectly, so any sense that you’re drinking booze gets covered up quite nicely. If you want to feel your booze going down, find another recipe. If you want a perfectly blended hot toddy that hides its booze content quite well, I can give this one an enthusiastic two thumbs up.
Try this recipe and let me know what you think!