Port Light

This is one of those majestic tasting cocktails that are only possible with highly specialized ingredients like La Grande Passion and honey whiskey. Of course, I make a lot of my own ingredients, so what you see here is a cocktail made almost entirely from my knocked off spirits collection. And honey whiskey isn't a requirement at all. The recipe I'm providing allows you to use hone and whiskey separately.

The advantage of honey whiskey for a bartender, however, is huge. Honey is very hard to work with in an environment where you cannot easily produce heat. Now that I'm mostly bartending in my kitchen, I have electrical burners. But you won't often see a bar where the bartender heats up something before adding it to a drink, which is what you have to do when you use honey.

Cold honey becomes a chunk of sugar when you shake it on ice. It gets left behind in the shaker and the drink comes out too tart. That is why honey whiskey exists in the first place. You skip a step when building a drink if you don't have to add hot water to your honey. And there are a lot of honey whiskey products out there--Irish Mist being my longtime favorite. But get your own bottle of whiskey and add two tablespoons of honey to it and let that expand into the spirit. You'll have your own infinitely more drinkable (if it was cheap) whiskey and a go-to sweetener to boot.

• 2 oz. bourbon (or honey whiskey)
• 1/2 oz. La Grande Passion
• 1/2 oz. honey (50:50 mixed with hot water if you don't have honey whiskey)
• 1 oz. lemon juice
• 1/2 egg white (or double the recipe, make two and drink them both)
• several mint sprigs

Combine liquid ingredients including egg white in a shaker with cracked ice. Shake vigorously and pour into Collins glass. Garnish with mint.