On the first day of digging into the Cocktails & Sons 12 Days of Cocktails, my true love didn’t give me a partridge in a pear tree. But I did make myself a delicious drink with a syrup made from roasted pear and pink peppercorns. Each of the 12 mixers that come in this creative gift box is featured in three different recipes in the accompanying booklet—an easy, an advanced and a non-alcoholic cocktail. The Sweater Weather was the easy pick; I just had to add gin and lime juice for a quick and tasty treat. I also tried the Buck Wild, mixing the pear syrup with bourbon, lemon juice and ginger beer.
I tasted a more than a dozen different drinks over the course of the last few weeks, and I loved being presented with idea after idea that could be made from a pretty basically stocked bar, and the flavors were always great. The blueberry thyme syrup went into a Bluebird with gin, lemon juice and “berry flavored sparkling water” (I chose blueberry and pomegranate Aha). I put the fig and allspice syrup into a Winter Old Fashioned—I added Tequilla Ocho’s new reposado aged in Widow Jane bourbon barrels for a nice twist on a favorite of mine.
