Celebrate Burns Night With These Scotch-Based Cocktails

Need a good excuse to drink copious amounts of scotch on a Sunday night? We’ve got you covered. January 25th marks the traditional Scottish holiday Burns Night — a celebration of the country’s most renowned poet, Robert Burns.

If you want to celebrate properly, you’ll need to whip up some haggis, neeps, and tatties for supper (what!?), wash it down with a good bottle of scotch, and recite some of Burns’s poetry — but we won’t blame you if you skip the haggis and go straight for the booze.

Any scotch will do the trick, but the most appropriate dram for this occasion is most definitely Cutty Sark — a brand of scotch that was inspired (somewhat indirectly) by a character in Burns’s famous poem Tam O’Shanter. While the brand’s backstory is quite long, the name comes from a witch in the poem who wore a cutty sark — a Scottish term for a very short nightgown.

Here’s a few cocktail ideas to get you going …If you ever get tired of drinking it neat, that is.

The Glasgow Dagger

• 2 oz. Cutty Sark Prohibition Edition
• 0.5 oz. Lustau Amontillado Sherry
• 0.5 oz. Lustau Pedro Ximenez Sherry
• 2 dashes Angostura Bitters

Combine ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir and strain into chilled cocktail glass with an orange zest.

The Orkney Chapel

• 2 oz Monkey Shoulder blended scotch
• .25 oz Lustau Amontillado Sherry
• .25 oz Sugar cane syrup
• .25 oz Grand Marnier
• .5 oz Dolin Dry Vermouth

Combine ingredients in a mixing glass with ice. Stir and strain into chilled cocktail glass with an orange zest.

The Smoking Gun

• 2 oz. Laphroaig 10 (or any other peaty scotch)
• 3/4 tsp. Fernet Branca
• 1/2 tsp. brown sugar cordial
• 2 dashes Fee Bros. whiskey barrel-aged bitters

Stir all ingredients and strain into a chilled glass. Garnish with a sprig of mint.

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