Bacon and Bourbon are perfect bedfellows in this delicious Old Fashioned variation. This sweet drink brings together some great flavors and you will walk away knowing how to fat wash your own spirits.

This was a really fun recipe to come up with and was really pleasantly surprised at how much I liked it. Yes, it is a bit on the sweet side, but this bacon bourbon maple Old Fashioned is a great twist on this classic cocktail. Not only are we going to construct the cocktail, but I am also going to talk about how I made a bacon bourbon with bacon straight from my fridge.

Fat washing your bourbon into bacon bourbon

While I have not done much of it, I am now a little infatuated with fat washing spirits. The premise is that you add a fat, in liquid form, to a liquor and then cool down the mix enough so that the fat solidifies. Once you remove the fat, you have a liquor that has some of the flavors of the fat you were being used. The two big ones that I imagine are bacon fat and coconut oil. Both solidify very nicely in cooler temps and both have a good, strong flavor.

Seriously, all you need to do for this is bake up a half pound of bacon (this time I cooked it in a baking pan). I kept some of the bacon as something to serve with this cocktail, but I also shoved some of it in my fat face. Mmmmm…. Bacon. Once the bacon grease had cooled down a bit, but not solidified, I poured it into a pint jar. I added 8 oz of bourbon to the same jar - DON’T MIX WHEN THE GREASE IS HOT YA DRINGUS - and put in the fridge.

By the next day, the bacon grease should solidify and you can remove with a spoon or whatever method you want. You should have a leftover mix of bacon-flavored bourbon to use for this cocktail or save for later. As a side note, I am not 100% sure how long this lasts and what the storing temps are. I would imagine it would preserve just fine, but I only do this in small batches and store in my fridge/freezer, just to be safe.

All the side stuff in this bacon bourbon maple Old Fashioned

It seemed natural to replace the sugar from the traditional recipe with maple syrup. We are really getting into breakfast territory here, right? But I didn’t stop there… to really give it that sort of breakfast feel, I decided that an orange wedge would be a perfect secondary accompaniment to this cocktail.

Overall, I am happy on how this added to my deep dive into the Old Fashioned cocktail. The orange does bring it a bit on the sweet side, but the combination of orange, bacon, and maple really bring this Bacon bourbon maple Old Fashioned together into some tasty yumminess.

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