Maple Brown Butter Bourbon

Brown butter-washed bourbon and maple — fat-washing (Don Lee, PDT, 2007), beurre noisette's toasted caramel adding nutty depth to bourbon's barrel sweetness.

The Maple Brown Butter Bourbon is a culinary cocktail that applies two kitchen techniques to spirit preparation: fat-washing (infusing bourbon with a fat to transfer flavor compounds before removing the fat by freezing and filtering) and browning butter (cooking butter until the milk solids caramelize into a complex, nutty flavor). Both techniques were brought to cocktail culture by the culinary-influenced craft bartenders of the early 21st century. Fat-washing was pioneered as a cocktail technique by Don Lee at PDT in New York in 2007 with his bacon-infused Benton's Old Fashioned, which demonstrated that the technique was both practically achievable and productively delicious. Brown butter — beurre noisette in French, meaning hazelnut butter for the color and nutty aroma it produces — is a classical French cooking technique achieved by cooking butter past the foaming stage until the milk solids turn golden and the fat takes on the aromatic quality of toasted hazelnuts and caramel. Combined with bourbon, the brown butter fat-wash introduces nutty, caramelized, slightly savory depth to the spirit's existing barrel-derived sweetness. The maple syrup sweetener provides the autumnal North American character that connects the drink to its regional ingredients: Vermont and Quebec butter, the maple, and the Kentucky bourbon forming a triangle of North American agricultural traditions.