An Old Fashioned With Scotch, More Scotch, Rum, and Honey

An delicious, complex, easy-drinking Old Fashioned for Scotch whisky fans.

Old Fashioned Week is coming to an end. 

Before it’s over, however, I want to celebrate with one of my favorite, lesser-known Old Fashioned variations — a pleasingly complex, easy-drinking riff that involves multiple bottles of scotch, a tiny bit of dark rum, and honey syrup. It’s sweet, smoky, and vaguely nautical without quite coming off as pirate-y, which is fitting, since it was the drink of choice for one Charles Horatio "Soc" McMorris, an American rear admiral during World War II. 

I first encountered this drink in April 2020, during the strange early days of the pandemic, when cocktail historian and all-around-knower-of-things-about-booze David Wondrich was posting a new cocktail recipe each day in an effort to find productive, or at least not-totally-and-completely-maddening, things to do at a time when nobody really knew what was going on. 

Naturally, I followed along and made several of the drinks. Of all the cocktails he posted during that period, this is my favorite, and by far the one I have returned to the most often. 

Admiral Morris’ Scotch Old Fashioned is a little wonder, a split-base Old Fashioned back before people referred to drinks with multiple base spirits as “split base.” It combines multiple types of Scotch with a hint of rum and a bit of honey to create a delightful fusion of elements — it’s sweet, strong, rich, and just complex enough to keep you interested, yet still incredibly accessible.

This is a drink you make to show your friends and nemeses what Scotch can do in mixed drinks, and how subtle twists can elevate a familiar style of cocktail. I’ve made it several times each year since first learning about it, and when I make it for friends, its combo of novelty of familiarity is always a hit. 

In the years since Wondrich posted the recipe, I’ve adapted it slightly, paring down the number of different bottles of Scotch he called for and tightening up some of the (understandably) loose quasi-measurements he employed.

Fundamentally, it’s the same idea and the same drink, but it’s a little bit more precise and a little bit more manageable for those who don’t have a large assortment of Scotch bottles sitting around. 

Part of what I like about this cocktail is how closely it sticks to the classic Old Fashioned formula — whiskey, sweetener, bitters — and how effectively it manages to tweak that formula with just a few little twists.

Like the elevated Whiskey Sour we looked at last week, it’s a little lesson in the endless power of cocktail structure. It’s also pretty easy to make, with just three bottles of booze, all of which should be fixtures in an expanded home bar, plus Angostura bitters and a syrup you can whip up in under two minutes. It’s easy. It’s interesting. It’s delicious. This is a cocktail that should be in every home bartender’s repertoire.

Double Your Scotch, Double Your Fun

Whiskey. Sugar. Bitters. 

A basic Old Fashioned requires just three ingredients. Indeed, earlier this week, we made a very, very basic — but surprisingly good — three-ingredient version using a collection of ingredients that cost about a dollar.

Yet as we’ve seen so many times before, you can take that basic structure and elaborate on it, adding complexity and changing the flavor profile while sticking to the underlying formula. That’s what the McMorris Old Fashioned does.