Lion's Tail Recipe
Lion's Tail Ingredients
2 oz / 60 ml Bourbon (I used Woodford Reserve)
.5 oz / 15 ml Allspice dram (also sold as pimento dram)
.5 oz / 15 ml Fresh lime juice
1 barspoon / 5 ml Simple syrup
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Orange peel
How to make a Lion's Tail
Add the bourbon, allspice dram, lime juice, simple syrup and bitters to a shaker. Fill with ice and shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds.
Double strain into a chilled coupe. Express the orange peel over the drink and drop it in.
Bourbon: anything in the 90 to 100 proof range. Woodford Reserve is what's in the video; Old Forester 100 or Wild Turkey 101 would stand up to the dram even better.
Dram: St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram or Hamilton Pimento Dram. If yours is a sweeter one, drop the simple syrup entirely.
Batching: it's a shaken drink, so batch the bourbon, dram and syrup ahead and add the lime and shake per drink, two at a time.
The Lion's Tail is a bourbon sour with one ingredient swapped in that changes everything: half an ounce of allspice dram, a rum liqueur steeped with allspice berries. It first shows up in the Café Royal Cocktail Book, London, 1937, which is a strange place for a bourbon drink to be born, and it sat forgotten until the tiki revival brought allspice dram back onto shelves. Allspice is the pumpkin-pie spice cabinet in one berry, clove and cinnamon and nutmeg at once, so this is the whiskey sour that tastes like November.
The build is a sour: two ounces of bourbon, half an ounce each of dram and fresh lime, a barspoon of simple syrup, two dashes of Angostura, shaken and served up with an orange peel. The dram is sweet on its own, which is why the syrup is a barspoon and not the usual half ounce. St. Elizabeth is the bottle most bars pour; Hamilton makes one too. A bottle lasts years because every recipe uses it by the quarter ounce.
It's one of the whiskey drinks in our Thanksgiving cocktail recipes, and the shaken counterpart to the stirred ones there. If you'd rather a stirred allspice drink, the Manhattan with New Riff malted rye gets the same clove-and-cinnamon finish from the whiskey and the bitters instead.
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