What is the ideal recipe to shoot two birds with one stone? There is this traditional, homemade remedy for sour throat, cough, cold, and all that. It is a syrup made out of pine cones. This one was made by my grandmother last year and I finally decided to open it. After you have had 5 teas with it and half of the bottle, the next step is to make a cocktail. A pine cone Sazerac to be precise. At first, I was going to make an Old Fashioned but decided that the herbal notes of Absinthe and bitters will play better with rye whiskey and the pine cones. The classic Sazerac is also a favorite of mine.

The syrup would replace the classic sugar cube or simple syrup in this concoction. I often find that it is easy to play with classic recipes just by swapping some small ingredients, they make the whole drink shift and become something new. A twist on a century-old recipe, a remix of a remix. It is interesting to open an old cocktail book, Savoy cocktail book is one of my favorites. Looking through the many pages with hundreds of drinks you can see that sometimes the littlest change makes the biggest difference. This pine cone Sazerac is proof of this fact.

While most often served on an ice block, I chose to serve this cocktail in a Nick & Nora glass. But any cocktail glass would work. I would drink a Margarita out of a coffee mug if I had to. And wine tastes good out of the bottle too. The most important thing to remember is to enjoy the drink and that in the current world situation, it is always five o’clock.

To put a festive New Years’ twist on this, serve with a burning juniper twig to get rid of any unwanted spirits or demons. Lord knows we got plenty of those in 2020.