Bacon Fat-Washed Old Fashioned

Bacon, bourbon, bitters & fancy maple syrup 🥓🥃🍁 It might not be for everyone (i.e. vegans, or just anyone who doesn’t like the idea of bacon in their cocktail) but this is an incredibly fun drink to try out at least once. Originally created by Don Lee in NYC in 2007, this cocktail essentially started the “fat washing” cocktail craze that is now fairly commonplace in most craft cocktail bars around the world.
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If you’ve never done a bacon fat wash before, next time you make breakfast just strain off the bacon grease into a mason jar & add bourbon. It’s similar to any other spirit infusion, except you put the jar in the fridge overnight which solidifies the fats, allowing you to easily remove it the next day. Then you’re left with subtly smoky & delicious bacon-infused whiskey.

Bacon Old fashioned — ingredients:

2 oz bacon fat washed bourbon
¼ oz barrel-aged maple syrup
4-5 dashes aromatic bitters
Orange zest and bacon

instructions:

Combine ingredients and stir with ice.

Strain into a rocks glass over a large cube of ice.

Garnish with orange zest as you would a typical Old Fashioned. Unless you just can’t get enough bacon, then you might as well throw a whole strip of crispy bacon on there!

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Back in the day, it was just referred to as a cocktail, consisting of some sort of spirit, sugar, water and bitters. As drinking culture developed, the word cocktail came to refer to any sort of mixed drink. To get this now classic concoction, people had to ask their bartender specifically for “an old fashioned cocktail.”

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RecipesJordan HughesSeptember 6, 2020bourbon, whiskey1 Comment