At some point during the Christmas festivities, you might be grateful for a long, refreshing drink with subtle notes of some of the lighter flavours of the season, and if you want to skip the gin, this makes for a great alcohol free Christmas cocktail as well. Two seasonal flavours work well together in this refreshing highball. Cranberry & Pine 50ml gin 30ml fresh lime juice 15ml pine syrup dash…
There are many ways to start the day with Champagne on 25 December, but this one ties in the traditional ‘Champagne Cocktail’ and our extra special festive mince pie brandy. The Champagne Cocktail dates all the way back to Jerry Thomas’ Bon Vivant’s Companion of 1862, and calls for a sugar cube, two dashes of aromatic bitters and 10ml of brandy to be placed in a Champagne flute and topped…
A Sazerac with a twist – the dried fruit flavour of our mince pie brandy and sweet sherry. This is what Father Christmas wants left out by the fireplace tonight! What was it in your house? Port? Sherry? A single malt? Maybe just milk? Father Christmas gets a selection of different drinks to accompany his mince pie or cookie as he travels the globe delivering presents to good boys and…
We’d recommend leaving one of these out for Father Christmas – although you may worry about the ice melting before he gets to your house, I understand elf magic can take care of that and ensure the drink stays at ideal drinking temperature and dilution until the man himself comes down your chimney. If you’re making one for Father Christmas though, you may as well mix one up for yourself…
Everyone needs a fantastic hot chocolate recipe up their sleeve at this time of year and the possibilities are endless. The simplest version just adds a dash of your favourite spirit or liqueur to the mug – we’re partial to using a punchy whisky like Talisker, or something from Islay with a decent hit of sea spray and peat. Other recipes call for brandy, Baileys or even mezcal for a…
A Saturday project for the last weeekend before Christmas, this mince pie brandy is easy to make (in just one weekend), and goes with almost anything. Well, anything you might want brandy with at least. It also produces at least 200g of brandy-infused mincemeat which can be put to good use in some pies. This infusion can be done ‘cold’ (but will take up to a week) or by this…
What do you look for in the perfect Christmas Champagne cocktail? The traditional recipe (our version is coming up soon) calls for brandy, a sugar cube and aromatic bitters. But with many families starting the day with Bucks Fizz, why not try something with a touch of our homemade spiced orange syrup instead? After all, Christmas Day is one of the few days that it is appropriate to start with…
When you start learning about whisky, a lot of terminology gets thrown at you. What makes this worse is that often there are different words for the same thing, or in this case – even worse – the same word for different things. With that, let’s take a look at what blended whisky means.
The simple answer is that it is whisky distilled from malted barley at a single distillery in Scotland, but a couple of these distinctions are particularly important.
A whisky riff on the Dickensian ‘Dog’s Nose’ with warm beer and mulling spice. The copper dog was a wee piece of copper tubing used by distillery staff to sneak whisky from the barrel, and is now the name of a fine blend of eight Speyside whiskies originating from the Copper Dog pub at The Craigellachie Hotel (a firm favourite of ours). Here, we use Copper Dog whisky in a…
