Two More Three-Ingredient Cocktails To Make With Last Week’s Honey-Peach Syrup

A pair of summer-friendly single-serve cocktails to make with your fruity custom syrup.

Last Friday, I wrote about Salted Honey Peach Mezcal Lemonade, a big-batch, scalable drink involving a custom honey-peach syrup. 

It’s a great summer holiday drink, because… 

• you can make it in advance for a group of friends and not have to shake drinks all night. 

• it’s spectacularly delicious.

It does, however, require making a custom honey-peach syrup — basically an infusion of peaches into a 3:1 honey syrup — either with a sous vide/immersion circulator (my preferred method) or heated on the stovetop (works in most any kitchen). 

If you made that syrup, you probably have some left over. And thus you may find yourself thinking:¹ What else can I do with this stuff? 

Well, you could always just make more Salted Honey Peach Mezcal Lemonade, because, once again, it’s delicious, and it’s convenient — and in my recent experience, bottles of that stuff go pretty quickly when there’s a group around.

But I am a strong proponent of experimentation. And most custom ingredients — even those created primarily for use in a single cocktail — should have secondary uses as well. 

So I want to recommend two single-serve drinks² that work very well with a peach-infused honey syrup, both of which also happen to be excellent fits for warm summer nights.  

The first is a honey peach riff on the Bee’s Knees.

I originally wrote about the Bee’s Knees more than two years ago, back when most of you weren’t yet subscribers. (Thank you for making this newsletter a success!)

So as a quick review: It’s a classic gin sour made with honey syrup instead of sugar syrup. The bright, botanical nature of gin not only goes well with honey, it goes especially well with honey and peach. So it’s a natural fit. 

(This is the drink pictured at the top of today’s newsletter.)

Honey-Peach Bee’s Knees

• ¾ ounce honey-peach syrup (see last week’s newsletter)

• ¾ ounce fresh lemon juice

• 2 ounces London Dry gin (preferably Tanqueray, but any London Dry will do)

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker. 

2. Add ice, then shake until thoroughly chilled, about 10-12 seconds. 

3. Strain into a coupe or Nick & Nora glass. No garnish 

The second is a slight riff on another drink recently featured in this newsletter — the frozen Gold Rush variant I dubbed the Cold Rush. 

If you like honey syrup, lemon, and bourbon blended into an icy, slushy-style drink…well, I’m pretty sure you’ll also like it with the addition of peach to the honey syrup.  

Honey-Peach Cold Rush

• 7 1.25 inch Tovolo ice cubes, or about 175 grams of ice 

• 1 ¼ ounce 3:1 honey-peach syrup (see last week’s newsletter)

• Fat ¾ ounce fresh lemon juice (just a tad more than ¾ ounce — but not quite a full ounce)

• 2 ounces bourbon, preferably Evan Williams Bottled-In-Bond/White Label, but your house bourbon will work  

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender.

2. Blend until smooth, about 10-20 seconds. 

3. Pour contents into a short glass. Drink through a straw.

A Large Dog Looking Longingly at Bottles of Whiskey

1. And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"

2. The Honey-Peach Cold Rush is a single-serve recipe. But you can scale it up to make a larger batch.