Drink · 4 min · 1 rocks glass
Oaxaca Old Fashioned
Mezcal, honey and bitters. Smoke and honey together are the reason this became a modern standard.
The sheet · 1 rocks glass · 4 min
easyWhy tonight. Mezcal, honey and bitters. Smoke and honey together are the reason this became a modern standard.
What it needs
Nothing confirmed on your shelf yet — this list is the whole ask.
- mezcal
- honey
- angostura
Good if you have them, fine if you do not: orange.
Method
- 1½ oz mezcal, ½ oz honey syrup, two dashes of Angostura. Stir over ice, serve over a big cube.
- Flame or express an orange peel over the top — the caramelized oil sits directly on the smoke and is the whole trick.
- Honey rather than sugar. Agave and honey belong together in a way agave and white sugar do not.
- Split it with tequila if the mezcal is a hard one; two-thirds tequila is still plenty smoky.
An educational pour, not a reprint of a licensed spec. No allergen or alcohol-safety claim.
Cook or pour it, then edit the shelf if you emptied a bottle or used the last of something.
Why each of these is on the list
What the ingredients are actually doing
- mezcal
- Smoke over the same agave backbone, and it does not blend so much as lead.
- honey
- Sweetness with a floral edge and enough body to change the texture of what it is in.
- angostura
- Bitters are seasoning for a drink — the salt of the bar.
Missing one of them? The substitutions are written against those jobs rather than against a chart, so they say what each replacement costs this dish in particular.
Cooks from the same box
If you bought for this, you can already make these
Shares mezcal, honey
Honey mezcal sour
Honey syrup and lime against smoke. Let the honey down with warm water first or it sinks straight to the bottom.
Shares mezcal, angostura
Mezcal Old Fashioned
Sugar and bitters against smoke, with an orange peel expressed hard over the top. Simpler than the Oaxaca and drier.
Shares mezcal, honey
Oaxaca coffee
Mezcal, coffee and honey. Smoke and roast are the same family of flavors, which is why this works and sounds like it should not.
Shares mezcal
Mezcal tonic
Smoke against quinine, over a lot of ice. Strange for one sip and then obvious.
Next
Cook it, then tell the shelf what you used.
The ranking is only as honest as the shelf behind it. Empty the cream, and everything that leaned on cream should stop being offered.