Cardhu Hot Toddy

Have not been feeling good today, so spent most of the day in bed.

Texann thought I would be blipping a Hot Toddy yesterday, so decided to make one today.

Although the exact origins of the Hot Toddy are unclear, it's likely to be a Scottish invention in its current form, drawn from the “kettles full of Todian spring” that Edinburgh poet Allan Ramsay once put pen to paper to describe. The ‘Todian Spring' in this instance refers to Tod's Well, the main well for Edinburgh, providing its water. So the hot kettles of water were the base, to which whisky was added. Around this time the inventor of penicillin, Sir Alexander Fleming, recommended “a whisky at bedtime”, so it’s clear that whisky with water, heated, became the most popular way to take the toddy. This can also be seen by its next citation, in The Pickwick Papers, first published in 1836. Charles Dickens writes there of “the whiskey toddy each man drunk after supper”. With notes of vanilla and dried fruit and a pleasantly smoky finish, Johnnie Walker provides the perfect base for the freshly boiled water that shouldn't be too hot to spoil the whisky but not too cool that it's no longer a Hot Toddy. Some renditions of the Hot Toddy suggest brewing the blend with black tea or coffee. Others recommend warming apple cider in a heatproof glass, though this produces something closer to a Mulled Cider.

The recipe I used here is 25ml of runny honey, 50ml Cardhu 12 year old, lemon juice, 75ml boiling water and cloves and stir well and then enjoy.