Jackson Mischler - The King Of Pumpkin Spice

With the crisp chill of fall finally in the air, it’s officially flannel and sweater season! We’re stocked up and ready to help you out with those items here in the shop, but today we’ve got something a little different to keep you warm this holiday season. Our wonderful staff member, Jackson, is a culinary whiz, and he prepared a cocktail recipe that will be perfect to keep the good times rolling on those festive fall nights. 

As an avid home chef, Jackson knows how vexing it can be to look for a recipe and have to navigate through an entire blog post before finding what you came for. So we’ll get to the recipe without further ado, but we hope you’ll stick around to read the rest of our blog for more tips and tricks!

Jackson just graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges up in the finger lakes region of New York with a double major in environmental studies and philosophy. He’s been at OTO for four years now as a seasonal worker, but this is his very first fall with us as he prepares his law school applications. It’s especially great to have him around this time of year because fall is his favorite season. 

When Jackson pitched this idea for our fall newsletter, we were excited to mix things up a little bit with a new kind of blog post. Still, we figured we ought to try the recipe ourselves before sharing it with you all. So in the name of recipe development we did a test run in the store a few weeks ago. The results were absolutely delicious!

We started by raiding the store for our favorite YETI products, figuring that the King Crab Orange color could pass as a pumpkin orange seasonal tone. If you want to fully replicate this experience, we recommend the Roadie 24 to keep your ingredients cool, a YETI Ice Bucket for your ice, and a YETI Cocktail Shaker to mix your beverage.

With our gear acquired, it was time to gather our ingredients. The key to this recipe is in its short list of high quality local ingredients. Jackson was inspired to create the recipe when he found some Pennsylvania Dutch Pumpkin Spice Cream Liqueur at the store. Ever since, we’ve been brainstorming other uses for this particular ingredient because it was so tasty.

Since we don’t have an espresso machine on hand, we had to run across the street to Mad Anthony to order 8 shots of espresso to go. The baristas didn’t bat an eye at our request, which says a lot about the caffeine consumption in this town! If you’re not trying to get overly caffeinated, this can be a great way to use up the extra coffee in your pot at home. Replacing the espresso with drip coffee can give it a more mild profile, and prevent any waste! 

Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t find a local vodka on such short notice, so we made do with the ever reliable Tito’s. Feel free to experiment as you like. 

On one particularly slow October afternoon, we converted our counter to a bartop and gave the recipe a try. The best part about this recipe is that it’s super simple. It’s a 1 to 1 to 1 ratio of the three main ingredients, so you can make one drink at a time or easily adjust to make a pitcher to share with all your coworkers (or friends!). Once you’ve chosen your quantities, all you have to do is shake it together over ice. It’s important to shake vigorously to mix the ingredients well, aerate the cocktail, and create a delectable layer of froth to top the surface of your drink. 

We opted to garnish our drink with a cinnamon stick, but there are a lot of options for that little bit of pizazz. You can do a brown sugar rim, sprinkle some cinnamon over the top, or add whatever little extra touch suits your fancy. In a pinch, you can skip the garnish and get right to sipping on your drink!

We had a lot of fun putting together this blog post, so we’re grateful if you stuck around this far. We hope you’ll give the drink a try and let us know how it goes! In the meantime, we’ll get back to helping y'all gear up for the winter with all our fun new arrivals.