Recipe
- 1oz Port cask rum (Foursquare)
- 1oz Port finished scotch (Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban)
- Barspoon of vanilla syrup (homemade)
- Couple dashes of vanilla barrel aged bitters (5×5 Tonics)
Stir all ingredients with ice, then strain into a rocks glass over a large cube of ice. Add a lemon or orange peel and enjoy.
About
I’ve been dialing back the cocktail craziness lately and sticking to the classics. The classics are in no way boring (to me), especially when there is so much opportunity to jazz it up!
Here we’ve got a split base Old Fashioned pulled together with a Port focus. Port is a sweet Portuguese dessert wine – specifically a fortified wine. Fortified means the wine has added distilled liquor to raise the ABV. This technique was used for preservation back in the day to help with spoilage problems.
To make regular wine, yeast is introduced to sugar-rich pressed grape juice (either added or natural from the environment). The yeasts will eat the sugars and produce alcohol as a byproduct, until the alcohol concentration becomes too high and kills the yeast. (self fulfilled death) To make Port wine, high proof liquor is added before the yeasts have consumed all the sugars in the fermenting grape juice, killing the yeasts earlier before they’ve consumed all the sugars, thus leaving residual sugars that keep the wine very sweet. It’s then aged in barrels before being bottled.
Used Port wine barrels have become a popular choice for spirit makers and adds a unique fruity richness to distilled spirits. I really love the Port influence in spirits and used two of my favs here!