The Bitter Cocktail Inspired By Winnie The Pooh

There's no shortage of recipes inspired by A.A. Milne's books about Christopher Robin's adventures in the One Hundred Acre Wood. Since these stories began in 1924, 50 million copies have been sold, per the CBC. It's probably safe to say that many children have grown up with Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Rabbit, Eeyore, Owl, and Kanga and Roo. 

National Heritage Academies has even set January 18 as National Winnie the Pooh Day for students to celebrate the author's birthday. Those students would probably love Virginia Ellison's Winnie Pooh Cookbook, which contains recipes for Marmalade on a Honeycomb or Poohanpiglet Pancakes.

What about the grownups? Is there a way to celebrate once you've read a few chapters and put the little ones to bed? Christy's Cozy Corners offers a punch recipe as an ode to Piglet. You could always top off this combination of pink lemonade, lemon-lime soda, and raspberry sherbet with some vodka. But there has to be a more sophisticated way to honor those loveable characters.

There is no shortage of grown-up cocktails that owe their inspiration to the inhabitants of The Hundred Acre Wood. Most of them are pretty sweet. Add honey, honey liquor, and vodka to some chamomile tea and you've got a Pooh'tini, a cocktail with enough provenance to garner inclusion in Difford's Guide. For another honey-centric cocktail, a Hunny Pot is a blend of rum, salted butter, mead, apple brandy, lemon, honey, and a dash of bitters from The Drinks Business.

Glass of Bubbly offers three more ways to honor Winnie the Pooh Day with creative sparkling wine spritzers. Three characters have customized ways to sweeten a spritzer. Piglet's cocktail attains a pink hue from raspberry lemonade, Tigger's uses orange juice, and Pooh Bear takes full advantage of honey.

For a less sentimental cocktail, there's the Piglet's Lament cocktail with gin, Campari, elderflower liquor, and sweet vermouth from Kindred Cocktails. 

As we age, our Tigger-like enthusiasm fades and the pessimistic Eeyore becomes more and more relatable. Bartender Toby Maloney, via Punch, introduces a cocktail for "the most bitter character in literature." He fights bitterness with bitters. They add Amari and a dash of bitters to a Negroni and call it Eeyore's Requiem.

Amari is a family of bitter liquors that are traditionally used to aid digestion, according to Martha Stewart. Campari and Aperol are two common examples that can be sipped before or after dinner but also bring a ton of complex herbal punch to cocktails. Cocktail bitters, like Angostura, differ from Amari because they're too potent to be drunk alone. So, they are added in drops or dashes.

Typically, a classic Negroni is equal parts Campari, gin, and vermouth. In this case, the ratios of those three are tipped toward Campari, so it's already a bitter-forward cocktail. A few dashes of orange bitters and an orange twist complete the Eeyore's Requiem.