The Cocktail Artist

It’s a tired cliché, but kind of true - time flies when you’re having fun. It has been just over two years since we began publishing this blog. We started it just to keep track of our recipes and share them (along with Chris’s artwork) with a few friends. To our surprise, we have created something that people (who are not our blood relatives) actually read! It really has been fun creating the posts and meeting other craft cocktail enthusiasts through the blog and our Instagram account.  We don’t typically share much personal information about ourselves. If you click around through the pages on our blog you will find the About Us section where we give brief bios. For those of you who don’t know us personally, we are a husband wife team (Chris and Beth). In December we celebrated 33 years of marriage (time really HAS flown!)… Beth is the one who comes up with the cocktail recipes, does the photography, and writes the blog. Chris is solely tasked with creating the original wor...

Now that we have most of the holiday decorations up its time to refocus our energy and make a cocktail! We were a bit parched after struggling with all of those strings of lights.  Mulling spice, cider, brandy, and citrus are all traditional ingredients in wassail – a warm punch that dates to the middle ages. Wassail is a great holiday drink, but it requires a bit of time and quite a few ingredients. We were looking to make something easier – preferably on the rocks since we worked up a sweat bringing those bins of decorations up from the basement!  We had some Apple Cider Simple Syrup leftover (previously used in our Apple Rye Cocktail ) and some terrific Spiced Rum from Far North Spirits , so we thought we would do a wassail riff on an Old Fashioned. A classic Old Fashioned contains a base spirit, a sweetener, bitters, and garnish. Our rum had plenty of spice, so we didn’t need the bitters, but we decided to throw in a bit more alcohol (and balance the spice) by ...