Cocktail · Backroad Bourbon
The Backroad old fashioned
Cold brew in an old fashioned. It has no business working.
18+. Contains alcohol. Over-18s only. Never serve to anyone under 18, and please drink responsibly — one of these is roughly two units.
Coffee cocktails are usually terrible. They are either a dessert in a martini glass or a shot of espresso dropped into something that did not want it, and both taste like a compromise.
This is neither, because it is not really a coffee cocktail. It is an old fashioned in which the coffee is doing the job the sugar and the oak normally do — and once you taste it in that order, it stops sounding strange.
Everything about the technique here is aimed at one thing: not diluting it. Cold coffee, cold glass, one big cube, stirred rather than shaken.
What you need
- 50ml bourbon
- 25ml Western Tamp Backroad Bourbon cold brew concentrate, cold
- 7.5ml demerara syrup (2 parts demerara sugar dissolved in 1 part hot water, then cooled)
- 2 dashes Angostura bitters
- 1 large ice cube, plus more for stirring
- A wide strip of orange peel
The roast for this Backroad Bourbon From £11.95 How to make it
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Make the demerara syrup first
Two parts demerara sugar to one part hot water, stirred until it clears, then left to cool completely. It keeps in the fridge for a month. Demerara rather than white — the molasses in it is the bridge between the coffee and the barrel notes in the bourbon.
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Chill your glass
Fill the glass with ice and water and leave it while you build the drink. Pour it out at the end. A cold glass slows dilution once the drink is in it.
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Build in a mixing glass
Bourbon, cold brew concentrate, syrup and bitters into a mixing glass. Fill it two-thirds with ice.
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Stir, do not shake
Stir for about twenty seconds, until the outside of the glass frosts. Shaking aerates it and turns it cloudy — this is a spirit-forward drink and it should be clear and silky.
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Strain over one big cube
Put a single large cube in the chilled glass and strain over it. One big cube has far less surface area than four small ones and melts much slower.
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Express the orange over the top
Pinch the peel skin-side down over the glass to spray the oils across the surface, run it round the rim, and drop it in.
Why it works
Bourbon spends years in charred oak picking up vanillin, caramelised sugars and woody tannin. A medium-dark coffee gets to almost exactly the same place through roasting instead — caramelisation in the bean gives you the same caramel and vanilla register, and the roast supplies the tannin. So the two are not contrasting flavours being forced together, they are the same flavours arrived at by different routes, and the drink reads as one thing rather than as coffee-with-booze-in-it. The Angostura is what stitches it: its baking spice sits over both. Cold brew rather than hot coffee because you want that flavour without watering the drink down or warming it up.
Worth knowing
- Make the cold brew concentrate using our cold brew method — the same 1:8 batch, just swap in Backroad Bourbon.
- Rye instead of bourbon makes it drier and peppery. Also very good, quite a different drink.
- For a zero-alcohol version, drop the bourbon, double the cold brew, add a splash of soda and keep everything else. It is not the same drink but it is a genuinely good one.
- The name is ours and the bourbon is in the bottle — our Backroad Bourbon blend is roasted coffee, not a barrel-aged bean.
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