Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The Gaelic Old Fashioned!

No, not garlic, read it again.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. If you’ve been following along and making cocktails with me this past year, you’ve probably got a bottle of sherry in the fridge and don’t quite know what to do with it. The obvious answer, of course, is “drink it.” But I do have a few recipes in mind that can help you use up that bottle in short order. Let’s make a Gaelic Old Fashioned. Here’s the recipe:

Gaelic Old Fashioned

2 ½ oz Roe and Co. Blended Irish Whiskey

1 oz Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry

½ oz honey syrup

5-6 dashes orange bitters

Orange twist

Stir all ingredients except the twist in a cocktail mixing glass over ice until cold. Strain into a double old fashioned glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with the orange twist.

Once you start looking for it, sherry pops up in a lot of cocktail recipes. It’s the foundation for most classic low-proof cocktails, like the Bamboo (sherry and dry vermouth) and the Sherry Cobbler (sherry, sugar, and citrus). It’s also a very sweet and flavorful ingredient in other drinks. Back at Crafted Cocktail, we’d make a batched version of this drink using bourbon and sherry. Sherry can swap in for simple syrup easily, and add a ton of nutty, exotic character to the glass in the process.

I must confess that I’m thoroughly bored with bourbon, however. I’ve worked a lot of Sundays at the local liquor store as a side hustle, and the endless parade of entitled white men asking for a “rare” overpriced bottle of Buffalo Trace or Weller Antique has gotten on my last nerve. It’s reached the point where distillers are relying on gimmicks to make their bottles stand out. No, putting a splinter of the barrel in the bottle won’t make what else is in the bottle taste better. Aging your bourbon in the luggage rack of Brad Paisley’s tour bus won’t do it any favors either. It’s not that bourbon is bad; it’s just turning into a sideshow instead of a beverage. I wanted to bring something new to that great Crafted Cocktail recipe for you.

Irish whiskey is more subtle and simple than bourbon. It’s made of barley instead of corn, and the taste is noticeably different. It doesn’t have the same thick mouth feel, and it’s less sweet and more mellow. An average Irish whiskey tastes thin and reedy; a good one has a lingering smoothness that stretches on forever. It’s the perfect palette for the nuttiness of sherry, or the brightness of orange, or the sweetness of honey. You can linger with an Irish whiskey cocktail. Bourbon can overwhelm you with thickness and barrel aging and pretentiousness. Irish whiskey is content to be what it is, and provide some needed space at the end of the week.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Ingredient shot. The Gaelic Old Fashioned vanished mysteriously after this photo was taken. Matthew Hooper 

Roe & Co Blended Irish Whiskey: Jameson’s is absolutely fine here. I think Jameson’s by itself is a little thin, but we’ve got more than enough going on this cocktail to balance that out. Roe & Co. has been on my radar ever since a distributor gave me a sample last year, and I’ve been dying to show it off. The taste of the whiskey lingers pleasantly long after its first sip, and it carries the flavor of the other cocktail ingredients with it. It’s not that more expensive than Jameson; I think it’s worth hunting down at the local liquor store.

Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry: There are other, better sherries out there, but this bottle works fine here. Even a cheap bottle of Taylor’s wouldn’t be an embarrassment. Sherries can vary wildly in sweetness; the honey syrup is the tool you need to balance the glass. If you’re using a dry fino sherry, up the honey to keep the cocktail balanced.

Honey syrup: Honey syrup is a 50/ 50 mix of honey and water, heated until the honey dissolves. Honey straight from the bear-shaped squeeze bottle is too thick to dissolve into a cocktail. Feel free to experiment with buckwheat honey or other varieties. I generally use wildflower or clover honey. The honey doesn’t register as a taste up front in the cocktail, but you’ll find it in the finish well after the first sip.

Orange bitters: Needed to keep the sweetness of the honey and sherry in check. I’m very generous with my bitters in all my cocktails. Use as much as you’d like.

Orange twist: This cocktail deserves a thick slice of orange peel. I used a horizontal peeler and trimmed the edges to make it look nice. Squeeze the peel over the glass before you drop it in. Some fresh orange oil is wonderful in this glass.

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