Knob Creek built a BBQ Old Fashioned to toast America's 250th birthday, and it might be the simplest upgrade you make to your 4th of July bar cart this summer. The drink starts with Knob Creek 9 Year Old: Independence Edition, a 100-proof Kentucky straight bourbon wearing a blue wax seal for the occasion, then adds honey syrup and a couple dashes of Memphis BBQ bitters. It is a backyard cocktail with a smoke-and-caramel backbone that holds up next to barbecue.
What Do You Call Your "Guys Trips"?
This is a classic Old Fashioned with two swaps that change the whole drink - honey for sugar, and BBQ bitters for plain Angostura. Here is what to know before you build one.
- Honey syrup dissolves clean and rounds off a 100-proof bourbon better than a muddled sugar cube ever will.
- Memphis BBQ bitters add smoke and spice without you firing up a smoker or infusing anything.
- One large cube beats a glass of crushed ice when the base spirit is 100 proof - slower melt, less dilution.
- The Independence Edition changed the bottle for America's 250th, but the bourbon inside is the same nine-year liquid.
- Bourbon has been in the room for a surprising amount of American history, from the Whiskey Rebellion to Prohibition.
- This Special Edition America 250 Bottle Is An Affordable Collector's Item
- Building the BBQ Old Fashioned
- 5 Great Moments in American History Brought to You by Bourbon
- The Whiskey Rebellion Tested the New Republic (1794)
- Abraham Lincoln Grew Up Along Knob Creek (1811 to 1816)
- Bourbon Shaped One of America's First Consumer-Protection Laws (1897)
- Bourbon Survived Prohibition on a Doctor's Note (1920 to 1933)
- Congress Made Bourbon "A Distinctive Product of the United States" (1964)
- This Is A Celebration Worth Toasting Right
Every 4th of July cookout has a default drink, and it is usually a cooler of cold beer. Nothing wrong with that. But if you want one cocktail that makes the spread feel intentional without chaining you to a shaker all afternoon, the BBQ Old Fashioned is the one I would pour. The BBQ bitters pick up the same smoke coming off the grill, so it sits next to the ribs instead of competing with them.
This Special Edition America 250 Bottle Is An Affordable Collector's Item
For America's 250th, Knob Creek changed the color of its signature wax seal to blue for the first time and paired it with a red, white, and blue label. The nod runs two ways: the country's semiquincentennial and what James B. Beam Distilling Co. bills as 230 years of American whiskey heritage.
The liquid did not change. It is the same Knob Creek 9 Year Old that fans already know - aged nine years in American oak, bottled at 100 proof (50% ABV), with notes of vanilla, deep caramel, and charred oak. It carries a $36.99 suggested retail price and is on shelves nationwide for a limited run. You can see the full release on the Knob Creek site.
At 100 proof, it has the backbone this drink needs. Stir a softer, lower-proof bourbon with honey syrup and bitters and it mostly vanishes; the Knob Creek still tastes like bourbon once the drink is built.
Building the BBQ Old Fashioned
The recipe is short, which is the point - four ingredients and a stir, no shaker required. Here is the build Knob Creek put together for the Independence Edition.
- 2 parts Knob Creek 9 Year Old: Independence Edition (about 2 oz for a single drink)
- ½ part honey syrup (about ½ oz)
- 2 dashes Memphis BBQ bitters
- Orange peel, for garnish
Add the bourbon, honey syrup, and BBQ bitters to a mixing glass. Fill with fresh ice and stir gently until it is cold. Strain over one large cube in a rocks glass and garnish with an orange peel.
No honey syrup on hand? Make it in two minutes: stir two parts honey into one part warm water until it loosens up, then let it cool. It pours and mixes far better than straight honey, which seizes the second it hits cold bourbon.
Two things are worth getting right. The single large cube keeps the drink cold without watering down a 100-proof pour the way crushed ice does - the difference between a drink that holds while you eat and one that is watery halfway through. The orange peel matters too: pinch it skin-side down over the glass before you drop it in so the oils spray across the surface and cut the honey.
One housekeeping note. This is a 100-proof cocktail, so it drinks bigger than a standard Old Fashioned. One is plenty before you are back on grill duty, and keep water in the rotation if it is a hot afternoon.
5 Great Moments in American History Brought to You by Bourbon
Short of planning a Kentucky Bourbon Trail road trip, sharing a toast to America's birthday is the next best thing for guys that love whiskey. A bourbon this tied to the country's 250th is a good reason to look at how often the spirit shows up in American history - and it shows up more than you would guess, from a tax revolt to a future president's childhood to a landmark consumer-protection law. Here are five worth knowing.
The Whiskey Rebellion Tested the New Republic (1794)
The first real challenge to federal authority in the United States was about whiskey. A 1791 excise tax on distilled spirits set off years of resistance among farmer-distillers in western Pennsylvania, and in 1794 President George Washington mustered a militia of roughly 13,000 men and rode out to meet them himself - the only sitting U.S. president ever to lead troops in the field. The uprising collapsed without a real battle, but it proved the young government could enforce a tax. The popular tale that the rebellion drove distillers into Kentucky and birthed bourbon is more legend than record - whiskey moved west with frontier settlement, not as one dramatic exodus.
Abraham Lincoln Grew Up Along Knob Creek (1811 to 1816)
Before he was a president, Abraham Lincoln was a Kentucky kid. From about 1811 to 1816, roughly ages two to seven, his family farmed land along Knob Creek in what is now LaRue County, Kentucky, and he later said the place held his earliest memories. That same creek is the namesake of Knob Creek bourbon, the small-batch label Booker Noe launched in 1992. The farm is preserved today as part of Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park, in the same central-Kentucky country where Beam still distills.
Bourbon Shaped One of America's First Consumer-Protection Laws (1897)
Long before the FDA existed, there was the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897. In an era when "whiskey" might be cut with anything from prune juice to creosote, the act let an honest distiller earn a federal green stamp by meeting strict rules: one distillery, one distilling season, at least four years in a government-supervised bonded warehouse, bottled at exactly 100 proof. It was one of the earliest federal consumer-protection measures in the country, and it predated the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act by nearly a decade. That 100-proof benchmark still reads as a mark of seriousness - it is the same proof sitting in your Independence Edition glass.
Bourbon Survived Prohibition on a Doctor's Note (1920 to 1933)
When the 18th Amendment shut down legal liquor in 1920, bourbon found a loophole: medicine. Whiskey stayed legal by prescription, with doctors writing scripts and pharmacies filling them, commonly a pint per patient every ten days, and only a handful of distilleries - usually counted as six - kept the federal licenses to bottle it. Bourbon is one of the few consumer products that stayed legal straight through a constitutional ban.
Congress Made Bourbon "A Distinctive Product of the United States" (1964)
In 1964, Congress passed a resolution recognizing bourbon as "a distinctive product of the United States," the same kind of protected status that ties Champagne to France or tequila to Mexico. It is the reason a whiskey has to be made in America to legally carry the name. For a spirit aged in new charred American oak and made almost entirely in one country, the recognition was overdue.
This Is A Celebration Worth Toasting Right
America turns 250 once, and a bourbon that spent nine years in oak is a fitting way to mark it. If you are making BBQ Old Fashioneds for more than a couple of people, do not build them one at a time and miss your own cookout. Stir up a pitcher ahead - hold the 2-to-½ ratio of bourbon to honey syrup, add the bitters, and give it a stir with ice right before guests arrive - then pour over big cubes you froze the night before and let everyone pinch their own orange peel.
And if the history leaves you curious about the source, Kentucky bourbon country is a strong guys trip on its own - the Kentucky Bourbon Trail strings together the major distilleries, and Beam's home in Clermont is on it. One last thing: this is a 100-proof pour, so go slower than you would with a beer and keep water on the table, especially if you are the one running the grill.
