Welcome To Wonkette Labor Day Drinking, With This Holiday's Cocktail, The Ranger!

A warm hug of a bourbon drink, to celebrate fall's arrival.

There, there, mister. You can order a mixed drink and still feel manly. It’s OK.

Happy Labor Day, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. It’s been a wild, fun, stressful, exciting weekend at the bar, and I am SO GLAD to have Labor Day off. Which is not to say that I’m not still thinking about cocktails. This drink’s intended as a warm hug for the bourbon lover — not challenging, but just exotic enough to feel special. Let’s make a Ranger. Here’s the recipe.

Ranger

2 ½ oz Maker’s Mark

¼ oz Amaretto

¼ oz Watershed Noccino

2 dashes Black Walnut Bitters

Stir all ingredients together in a cocktail vessel with ice until the outside of the vessel feels cold. Strain into a rocks glass over ice. Garnish with a Luxardo cherry.

I love making punk rock tiki cocktails that use challenging ingredients like Malort, Fernet-Branca, or Underberg. But the bar’s menu needs a few more entry-point cocktails to make first-timers to the cocktail scene feel comfortable ordering mixed drinks. This drink was written with the bourbon drinker in mind. The comforting walnut flavor supports the oak and vanilla notes of a good bourbon.

The Old Fashioned is a great starting point for a new cocktail. It’s a delicious drink in its own right — bourbon, a touch of dark sugar, some Angostura bitters to add some spice and tamp down the sweetness. I’ve referred to the sugar and bitters as “the salt and pepper on a steak” — a little spice to enhance the base flavors, but nothing to challenge the essential nature of the spirit.

With that in mind, there are many opportunities to make this drink special. You can substitute the sugar with any sweet liquor to add flavor to the cocktail. Likewise, there are a host of bitters on the market these days designed to complement bourbon. Old Forester and Woodford Reserve have both crafted lines of bitters that scream “Old Fashioned” — spiced cherry or cinnamon flavors that play right into the traditional Luxardo cherry garnish.

We already have a drink on Hemingway’s menu that plays the “Old Fashioned Plus” card. It’s called the Midnight Sermon, and it uses an excellent coffee liquor for the sugar component paired with orange bitters. Surprisingly, I’ve encountered some pushback to this drink. Some (pitiable) folks don’t like coffee. Others worry about the caffeine from half an ounce of coffee liquor at 10 PM. Whatever the issue, I’m hoping this drink will win those holdouts over.

Let’s talk ingredients:

This is what the ceiling of my office looks like.

Maker’s Mark Bourbon: This classic bourbon is very oak-forward and mild; it’s easy to overlook when there are so many good bourbons on the market today, but I love it as a baseline spirit when building a cocktail. The rail bourbon at Hemingway’s is Buffalo Trace. If you can get a bottle of that locally, I’d firmly recommend it.

Bourbon sales are declining nationwide. Diageo reported a 7.3 percent drop in annual sales for Bulleit bourbon. We’re already seeing bankruptcies in Kentucky. If you’re a bourbon fan, we need to step up and buy from small distillers who haven’t made a name for themselves yet. If we don’t, we’ll all end up buying Benchmark in a year or two and telling ourselves how smooth it is.

Watershed Noccino: Noccino is definitely a niche liqueur. It’s not hard to get here in Ohio; Watershed Distillery in Columbus makes some excellent bottles. Order online from them, or go ahead and use ½ oz of Amaretto if you don’t want to run to the liquor store on Labor Day.

Amaretto: You might think this is an almond liquor, but Amaretto actually derives its flavor from the pits of stone fruits like apricot and peach. In small amounts, it provides a generic “nut” flavor rather than distinct almond notes. Don’t use generic Amaretto for this drink. You’ll regret it. Amaretto di Sarano is the gold standard here, and is well worth the money.

Black Walnut Bitters: Orange bitters will do in a pinch, but hitting the “nut” flavors from as many points of attack as possible keeps the drink from being an “amaretto” cocktail or a “black walnut” cocktail instead of a bourbon drink with nut flavors.

Garnish: The cherry’s a comfort zone for Old Fashioned lovers. Don’t skip this one.

My home bar is Hemingway’s Underground, the hottest cocktail bar in pretty little Medina, Ohio. I’m behind the stick Wednesday-Saturday, 4-10. Last call’s at midnight. Swing on by and I’ll make this drink for you… or anything else from our little Happy Hour here at Wonkette.

OPEN THREAD!