If Hot Toddies Aren't Your Thing, Try One Cold

Hot toddies are to fall and winter as frozen drinks are to spring and summer. Each is a harbinger of the seasonal promise to come: fun and sun in the latter case, and cute boots, snazzy jackets, and leaf peeping in the former. Frozen drinks, however, are a much more broad category to choose from. You've got the classic frozen margarita, the tropical mashup that makes up the Miami Vice, and an even deeper well of frosty cocktails that trace back all the way to Prohibition. Hot toddies, on the other hand, typically just consist of hot water, honey, lemon juice, and bourbon. The most variation you'll get is in a little flexibility on the dark spirit, with some imbibers preferring rum or brandy, but that's about as adaptable as a hot toddy gets. Unless you chill.

Cold toddies are fairly self explanatory. They also take the booze of your preference, a bit of honey, water, and serve it all on ice. But cold toddies require a little more consideration than their steaming antecedents, both because they're less familiar, and because their ingredients are just a little harder to marry. Honey won't just warm up to any temperature; it needs a little heat to coalesce. But you can still turn your hot toddy cold with a small adjustment.

You probably use simple syrup to sweeten your iced drinks because it blends better with other ingredients versus granulated sugar, whose crystals tend to gather at the bottom of a glass in inexpert preparations. The same goes for honey, to an even more onerous degree, as its thicker consistency is even less conducive to distribution as it cools. But this only takes a few minutes to resolve.

Honey syrup is as easy to make as simple syrup, even using with the same ratios. If you wanted a batch, you could heat ½ cup of honey with ½ cup of water on the stovetop and store it in the refrigerator for about a month. But you'll also need to adjust your cold toddies to accommodate the honey dilution. Should you aim to include 1 ounce of honey in your cold toddy, for example, you'll want to amp it up to 2 ounces of the honey simple syrup, instead, to reach the accurately intended measurement. Add a few ounces of liquor, a splash of lemon, and cool water, stir vigorously with ice, and serve in a rocks glass for a novel switcheroo.