Craft A Makeshift Old Fashioned With Just Bourbon And Dr Pepper

In a perfect world, you'd never have to drink anything less than the highest quality version of your favorite cocktail — shaken or stirred by a pro, utilizing fresh ingredients and premium spirits. But in reality, there are plenty of situations where your resources are limited, from plane rides, camping trips, and tailgates to impromptu parties or the arrival of unexpected house guests. In these circumstances, it's incredibly handy to have an easy, makeshift recipe up your sleeve — especially one that actually makes a tasty drink.

The classic old fashioned is one of the world's best-known and most-loved tipples, so it's safe to assume that this hack will help a lot of cocktail aficionados: Simply combine bourbon and Dr Pepper. The true recipe calls for bourbon with water and sugar — or simple syrup — plus bitters (traditionally Angostura). Enhanced by a garnish of an orange slice or peel and a cherry, the finishing flavor profile deftly balances bourbon's subtle boozy heat, woodiness, and sweet, spicy notes of caramel, vanilla, baking spices, and tobacco with a complementary combo of sugar's straightforward sweetness and the spice and bitterness of the Angostura bitters. While Dr Pepper is cagey about what ingredients create its flavor profile, people have analyzed its sensory characteristics to pull out qualities of cherry, plum, almond, sarsaparilla, sassafras, vanilla, black licorice, cinnamon, ginger, clove, and molasses. At least in terms of what we can taste, Dr Pepper boasts many of the same notes that are in bourbon as well as simple syrup and bitters.

When you add Dr Pepper to bourbon, you accomplishing a profile remarkably similar to that of an iconic old fashioned, but in two simple steps — no muddling or dashing required. All you have to do is add however much soda you'd like to one to two ounces of bourbon; a splash will do the trick, but you can pour in more for a less boozy finish. If you do have an orange on hand, a squeeze of its peel over your glass for a bright punch of its essential oils helps even more.

You might like the combo so much that you make it even when you do have time and more ingredients on hand, and this opens up a fresh pathway of creativity. This soda could, in fact, become one of the new ways you upgrade your old fashioned. Dr Pepper and cherry liqueur are sweet and rounded together, for instance — a dream match for bourbon. You can pull out certain notes from the soda by adding cinnamon, maple syrup, honey, ginger, vanilla, or a splash of amaretto. Any spices or fruits can easily make their way into a cocktail as an upgraded DIY simple syrup, just heat them with equal parts sugar and water. You can also add bitters back into the mix for other accents, from chocolate to cherry to coffee — just be sure to balance things out with the acidity of orange or lemon.