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.
The cucumber lemon balm provided an extra refreshing layer to a gin and soda, the strawberry rose took my strawberry daiquiri to new heights, and I opted for the non-alcoholic recipe with the cranberry and bergamont syrup—a Red Ryder mixed with ginger beer and lime juice. It was so good, I immediately made myself another.
The Wassail was the most seasonally appropriate syrup for these winter months. It made for a lovely late-night drink called All Cozy Up in Front of the Fire, made with hot water, aged rum and a little lemon juice. I drank it all cozy up in front of my fire.
The flavor quality was solid on each of the 12 syrups, and the recipes ranged from the simple to the unexpected. At $49.95, it’s an affordable gift for that cocktail lover in your life, and each bottle is good for three or four cocktails. But what I most appreciated about the set was just having the ideas for new cocktails laid about before me each night I was in the mood for something new to drink.
Josh Jackson is Paste’s co-founder and editor-in-chief. You can follow him on Twitter @joshjackson.