The Perfect Fall Whiskey Drinks to Make

A Stinger is a classic cocktail, a two-step of Cognac and creme de menthe. The Midnight riff comes to us from Sam Ross, then of the legendary Milk & Honey, and turns the classic into a sour, bringing lemon juice to tart up the old Stinger profile but subbing bourbon for Cognac and Fernet Branca for the mint liqueur. And while it seems rude for mint to RSVP only for Fernet Branca to show up, it turns out that arriving with bourbon is a good way to be let in the door. The cocktail is a fantastic way to get acquainted with Fernet Branca, and who knows? Give it some time and you might even come to like it.

Shake four to six seconds on a handful of crushed ice, pour ice and cocktail into a rocks glass, pack with more crushed ice, and garnish with a mint sprig.

The problem with adding smoke to your cocktails is that it’s a blunt tool that’s so easy to use wrong. When you’re out at a bar and see the glass cloche filled with smoke lifted to reveal a drink inside, it’s a pretty safe bet that the cocktail will not be good. Smoking a cocktail like that is far too imprecise. But there is a better way to smoke your cocktail and in an episode of our Cocktails for Grown Ups, we show you how to do it. First, we demonstrate how you can smoke your syrup if you’re making a bunch of smoky drinks. Second, we show you our method when you’re making just one drink at a time. The smoky cocktail in question here is the Palo Santo, one created for the Michelin three-star restaurant Addison.

Combine ingredients in a mixing glass with ice and stir for 10 to 25 seconds (shorter for small ice, longer for big ice). Then, put a piece of palo santo wood on a non-reactive surface (stainless steel, a cast iron pan, or just a larger piece of different wood) and burn it with a blowtorch until it starts to smoke. Invert your glass over the smoke and let it infuse there for eight to 10 seconds, then flip the glass right-side-up, allowing the smoke to escape. The

This classic from 1937 is the perfect autumnal whiskey drink, with half its soul in summer and the other half in winter. On one hand, it’s made refreshing with lime juice, and is totally suited for backyard barbecue sipping. On the other, the recipe incorporates a small but significant amount of allspice liqueur, which gives it an avalanche of textured spice that finds it a home by the fire. The Lion’s Tail is a transitional drink that tastes like if a Jamaican jerk chicken and a Whiskey Sour couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker. Add ice and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain off the ice into a cocktail or coupe glass. Garnish with a lime peel, a lime wheel, or nothing at all.

This Old Fashioned variation is an Improved Whiskey Cocktail (whiskey, maraschino, bitters, and absinthe) without the absinthe. True, getting rid of just a spoonful of absinthe isn’t a huge reinvention, but that lack of the spirit’s strong flavors lets the maraschino really shine in the Fancy Free.

Build in an Old Fashioned glass over the biggest piece of ice you have. Stir 10 to 15 seconds and garnish with an orange peel.

Of the 10 million or so variations on the Negroni the Boulevardier is probably the oldest and almost certainly the best. A mixture of bourbon, Campari, and sweet vermouth, the Boulevardier replaces the prickly gin with the broad oaky shoulders of a good American whiskey, bringing a welcome touch of vanilla to Campari’s orange. It’s branchy herbaceousness, ample fruit, and bittersweet character fit into the season perfectly, equally at home in both warm and cold weather, and either before or after dinner,

Add ingredients to a rocks glass with ice. Stir for 10 seconds if the ice is small, 30 seconds if one big cube and somewhere between if ice is somewhere between. Garnish with an orange peel.

Created by bartender Erick Castro at Rickhouse in San Francisco, the Kentucky Buck is a bourbon, ginger and strawberry cocktail that’s great with a ginger beer, but even better with fresh ginger syrup and sparkling water. If it sounds like a Moscow Mule with bourbon and strawberries it’s because that’s exactly what it is, but the mule was passé by that point in San Francisco, so Castro reached deeper into history for the name. A “Buck” is a style of cocktail that dates back to the 1890s—long before the Mule or the Dark ‘n Stormy—and was composed of just a spirit (usually whiskey) and ginger beer, so named because the ginger and alcohol together would give quite a kick (the Moscow Mule is named similarly, for the kick).

Muddle the strawberry in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. Add bourbon, lemon, ginger syrup, and bitters, and shake for six to eight seconds. Strain over fresh ice in a tall glass and top with soda water. Garnish with a half strawberry or a lemon wheel or a mint sprig or all three.

This is a drink that practically started a cocktail revolution on its own. When bartender Don Lee decided he wanted to add bacon to a drink while working at famed bar PDT in New York, he eventually came upon the technique called fat washing, that chefs at experimental restaurant WD~50 had been toying with. To get the flavor of bacon without the greasiness, Lee and Co. found that he could combine bourbon and bacon fat, then freeze the mixture and strain out the solids, leaving a spirit infused with the flavor compounds behind. Now numerous cocktails are made with fat-washed spirits that add an exciting layer of flavor (like our Olive Oil Martini), but the Benton’s Old Fashioned is the originator and one of the best.

Benton’s Old Fashioned

Add a large piece of ice to a rocks glass, add liquids, and stir for about 10 seconds. Express the oils of an orange peel over the top and place the peel in the drink as a garnish.

*Bacon-infused Bourbon

Put two or three strips of bacon in a pan, and heat gently and slowly—you want to make extra sure not to scorch or smoke the fat. When the bacon is almost cooked, pour off the liquid rendered fat into a separate container.

You need 0.5 oz. (1 tbsp) of fat for every 8 oz. of bourbon, so start with that ratio and scale up if you desire. Combine the two in a non-reactive container and stir. Let sit at room temp for four to 24 hours, then transfer to the freezer until frozen (about 2 hrs.). Strain the liquid off the now-solid fat through a coffee filter or cheesecloth, and it should be totally clear.

We hear you thinking. “The Amaretto Sour? I thought this was about whiskey drinks?” Well, the Amaretto Sour is a whiskey drink, or at least, it should be. It’s been 10 years since a bartender named Jeffrey Morgenthaler wrote on his blog that he had derived “the best Amaretto Sour in the world,” and it was the shake heard round the world. Morgenthaler’s version—amaretto and lemon, punched up with a pour of high-proof bourbon, and smoothed out with an egg white—utterly transforms the drink. “It’s difficult to overstate how many favors the addition of high-proof bourbon does for the Amaretto Sour,” we write, “it’s not a revision so much as it is born again.”

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker and shake without ice for five to seven seconds to whip the egg white. Add ice and shake hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain either over fresh ice in a large rocks glass or up in a coupe. Garnish with a lemon peel and, if you like, a cherry.

In 2004 in San Francisco, everyone who was doing “mixology” was leaning into the region’s year-round availability of fresh produce, so the city’s cocktails were full of things like satsuma mandarins and fennel bulbs and garnished with fistfuls of lemon balm. Jon Santer, with his Revolver, went a different way. This dark and broody Old Fashioned variation is, we claim, “among the best cocktails in the neo-classic pantheon,” and comes with a bonus kick of caffeine to help with the shift back to standard time, for when you go to Happy Hour and it’s already pitch black outside.

Add all ingredients to a rocks glass over a large piece of ice and stir. Garnish with a flamed orange peel or a regular orange peel.

We write that the Paper Plane is “like a whiskey and orange juice that grew up handsome, and for whom everything is going right.” This crowd pleaser, invented by bartender Sam Ross in 2008, gets its charm from two different bittersweet Italian liqueurs, even though the resulting cocktail is neither particularly bitter nor sweet. It is simple to make, and easy to like and “might be,” we claim, “the best cocktail invented in the last 100 years.”

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake for six to 10 seconds. Strain up into a coupe or cocktail glass.