Ten candies and a cup of water are all it takes to turn a childhood sweet into a cocktail syrup. That’s the entire trick behind this drink, and it works because Werther’s Originals are basically hardened caramel: melt them down and you get a toffee syrup with almost no extra effort.
The cocktail itself comes from Bankhall, the Blackpool distillery behind Bankhall Sweet Mash. It’s an Old Fashioned, built the classic way, but the sugar cube gets replaced with something that tastes like it came out of your grandmother’s sweet tin.
What Bankhall Sweet Mash brings to it
Bankhall Sweet Mash isn’t technically a whisky yet, at least not by UK rules, since it hasn’t hit the minimum age. It’s a bourbon-style spirit made from corn, rye, and malted barley, triple distilled, aged in new American charred oak, unfiltered, and bottled at 46% ABV. Distillery manager Vince Oleson moved from New York to Blackpool to make it, and the result already has the caramel and vanilla notes an Old Fashioned wants, before the syrup even gets involved. That’s why Werther’s works so well here: the candy just amplifies flavors the spirit already has.
What you’ll need
The full measurements live in the recipe card below, but in short: Bankhall Sweet Mash (or a similar bourbon-style whisky if you can’t get hold of it), a bag of Werther’s Originals, water, Angostura bitters, and an orange for the zest. That’s it. No special equipment, no bar tools beyond a mixing glass and a strainer.
How to turn Werther’s into a syrup
This is the only technique in the whole recipe, and it’s super simple: warm water and candies together in a small pot until the candies dissolve completely. Don’t rush it with high heat, or you risk scorching the sugar and getting a bitter edge instead of clean toffee flavor. A gentle simmer, stirred occasionally, gets you there in well under ten minutes.
One thing worth knowing before you start: the syrup is already sweet enough on its own. Adding extra sugar, which some recipes suggest, tends to push the drink from balanced into cloying. Taste it before you decide it needs anything else.
Building the cocktail
Once the syrup’s ready, it’s a standard Old Fashioned build: spirit, syrup, and bitters stirred with ice, then strained over a single large cube. The orange zest goes in last, expressed over the glass so the oils hit the surface of the drink rather than getting stirred in and lost.
Getting the balance right
The most common mistake is treating the syrup like simple syrup and using too much of it. Werther’s syrup is denser in flavor than plain sugar syrup, so it takes less to get the same sweetness, and overshooting turns the drink into liquid candy rather than a cocktail with candy notes. Start light, taste, and adjust.
The second mistake is skipping the zest. Without it, the drink reads as one-note sweet. The orange oil cuts through the caramel and gives the whole thing some lift.
If you don’t have Bankhall Sweet Mash, any young, caramel-forward bourbon-style whisky will get you close. Just avoid anything heavily peated or smoky. The syrup is delicate enough that smoke will steamroll it.
Looking for more Old Fashioned variations? The Woodford Reserve Old Fashioned takes a more classic route, and our full guide to Bankhall Sweet Mash covers where to find the spirit and more ways to use it.
And if you’d rather have someone else do the pouring, London Cocktail Tours will show you where London’s bartenders are doing their own creative spins on the cocktails.
Here is the recipe
Bankhall Werther’s Old Fashioned
Ingredients
- 50 ml Bankhall Sweet Mash
- 10 ml Werther’s Original Sugar Syrup
- 1 dash Angostura Bitters
- Garnish: Orange Zest
Instructions
- Add all the ingredients to a mixing glass
- Add ice
- Stir, stir, stir
- Strain into rocks glass with one gorgeous piece of ice
- Garnish with the orange zest
Notes
Nutrition
This cocktail was sponsored by:
