Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, Whiskey Fix For the Femme Fatale!

This one's a wild ride. Hold on and trust your bartender.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. I’ve been wanting to post this cocktail for a year or so, but it’s a controversial recipe. One of the ingredients has gotten an unsavory reputation over the years. But there’s a lot to love here, if you can get over your preconceptions, and very possibly your bad experiences. Trust me. This will change your mind about … Jägermeister. Let’s make a Whiskey Fix for the Femme Fatale.

Whiskey Fix for the Femme Fatale

2 oz Bulleit Rye Whiskey

1 oz Jägermeister

1 oz honey syrup

.5 oz lemon juice

Shake all ingredients and serve in double old fashioned glass with ice. Garnish with a lemon twist.

Let’s get some basics out of the way before addressing the elephant in the room. A “fix” is a cocktail that uses any spirit, lemon juice, and simple syrup. It’s an ur-cocktail, something so basic that it stands as the foundation for a huge number of drinks. A “gin fix” is gin, lemon juice, and sugar; add soda water to that and it’s a Tom Collins. A “rum fix” with lime juice is a daiquiri. A “vodka fix” is almost a lemon drop. You get the idea. The acid and sugar mellow out any spirit and makes it a smooth sipper instead of a harsh shot. It’s a simple, perfect drink.

The alliteration of a “whiskey fix” is too tempting to resist, and many craft cocktail bars make some variation on the theme. Because it’s so simple, the fix lends itself to all sorts of variations. The Spotted Owl in Cleveland features the “Whiskey Fix for the Painproof Man” on its menu. It’s a classic fix — lemon, sugar, rye whiskey — with the addition of Cynar, an artichoke-based aperitif that is fabulous with any aged spirit. Cynar is great, but it’s not cheap and it’s hard to get. I wanted to find another nice aperitif that plays well with whiskey for my take on the fix.

Enter Jägermeister. I know, I know. You drank ice-cold shots of it when you were young and immortal, you got sick on it, you swore you’d never drink it again. It was never meant to be drunk as an ice-cold shot. It’s meant to flavor other things. You add it to water, or whiskey, or even wine, and it becomes great. It was always meant to be diluted; the Dutch shipped it overseas as a concentrate, and boneheaded Americans drank it neat to maximize the alcohol content. Taste it as its creators intended, as a flavor to make other things better. Give it a little room to breathe, and that nasty cough-syrup taste vanishes. Trust me. Give it a go.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Ingredient shot. The honey bear is just glad to be here. Matthew Hooper 

Bulleit Rye Whiskey: Bulleit is a nice, peppery, middle-of-the-road rye that works great here. Any other quality rye will do as well. A quick refresher: Rye whiskey is made with 51 percent rye, 49 percent corn or wheat. Bourbon is mostly corn. Rye whiskey is to bourbon as rye bread is to cornbread: One is dark and peppery, the other is sweet and mellow. Bourbon will fall down and crumple in this glass. Use a sturdy rye to stand up to the other flavors.

Jägermeister: Okay, okay, if you can’t even stomach the thought of Jaeger, other options are open. I already mentioned Cynar as a choice. Minty, complex Fernet Branca is another. Jaeger makes a cold brew coffee liqueur that I’m dying to try. But be brave, invest in a half pint of Jaeger at the liquor store, and give this another try. In moderation with other ingredients, it becomes herbal and bracing in a way that embraces the lemon and honey wonderfully. Trust me. You’ll like this.

Lemon juice: Always fresh. The Jaeger isn’t as sweet as you remember; you’ll need to use a light hand on the lemon here.

Honey syrup: Honey straight out of the little plastic bear is too thick to shake in a cocktail. Pour equal parts honey and water into a small glass and microwave it for 15 seconds. Stir it a little, and your honey syrup is good to go.

Garnish: I’m not horribly picky on the glass; a narrow highball glass or coupe work just fine. A fix is nothing if not versatile. By the same token, an orange twist would be great here too. The Spotted Owl garnished their whiskey fix with bittersweet chocolate shavings, which line up with the minty Jaeger nicely. Be brave, make your own choices, because the fix is in.

In summary and conclusion, drink well, drink often, and tip your bartender — donate to Wonkette at the link below! And if you'd like to buy some bar gear or books from Amazon, please click here! 

OPEN THREAD! Remember, vote first, drink after!