Hello drinkers of cocktails. I’ve been mixing this for a while, and Victoria Nece seems to quite like it. Occasionally she asks me to make her one of these, but it turns out I can’t remember the proportions. Sometimes even the ingredients escape me. She’s trying to vote now, so I thought I’d work out the recipe once and for all. She might like one when she gets home.
- 60 grams bourbon
- 15 grams triple sec
- splash blood orange bitters
Mix the ingredients together in a low glass with a heavy base. Room temp? Stir? Pour? Shake? up to you.
The drink actually works well at room temperature, but you can drop in some rocks if you like, or even do what I did here, which was pour it back and forth into a pint glass a few times with a couple ice cubes to chill it down and get some air in. Though honestly I don’t know if the air does anything. I’ve got a hunch it does though. All those people mucking about with pulled tea must know something I don’t, right?
“Blood Orange Bitters” is one of those marketing campaign ingredients. It’s starting to turn up in cocktail recipes and things, but it’s really just this one brand of it that’s everyone’s using. You can see the bottle in the background up there a little bit, and also the brand. I don’t think it would work properly with Angostura, as these bitters are actually quite sweet. I don’t like to jump on the specifically-requiring-a-trendy-new-ingredient bandwagon, but it’s a tasty drink, and the branded bottle is more and more available, and if you’re really crazy you can rig your own substitute.
I have to confess that I’m betraying my friends with this post a little. When Victoria was in London last month, shortly after I was there, she had everyone drinking these things, and they couldn’t decide on a proper name. It’s apparently similar to something else, but not quite the same, and I’d like to think that there was some little measure of deference to the drink’s most recent creator about picking a name. I haven’t done. So I suppose we’ll have to keep on with “orangey bourbony thingy”.
