Ok. I have just made a “hot toddy.”
Here is what’s in it:
1 T honey
2 t lemon juice
1 oz bourbon
6 oz tea
Should I be loving it? I’m planning to experiment with brandy in the next one.
Once I did have a very good tea-based hot beverage at a bar, but I believe the spirit involved was some sort
of liqueur…can’t recall what.
Well, perhaps it will scare away any rhinoviruses in advance.
Rum for a hot toddy, should be coconut rum or at least Scotch. Most rhinoviruses are too big for my nose.
I second the rum. Also, what variety of tea did you happen to use?
darjeeling.
I seem to remember a long phase of lemon-honey-brandy-hot water, every time a sniffle appeared.
Lots of chuckling, then phhhhhhhhht…it was morning.
The tea addition sounds right.
That’s approximately what I know as a hot toddy, AKA whisky punch. “Punch” because it has five ingredients, and all those old India Hands know that “panch” is hindi for “five”.
Whisky …if it’s all you have, then Bourbon …
Hot (boiling) water - that’s why those whisky tumblers have thick glass bottoms, so they can take the heat.
3 or four whole cloves that’s what Em didn’t have.
Juice of a quarter of a lemon. Long experiment has established that one lemon can furnish four hot toddies.
Teaspoonful of honey. Or sugar, if you must.
If you are pretending to be an Old India Hand, as you do after long bouts of reading Kipling or Somerset Maughm, and you vary the liquor, then it becomes a “shrub”. Another hindi word, “sharab”, means alcohol of any kind.
And there you have one of the main reasons I love this board! It’s full of fascinating information! Fascinating information provided by equally fascinating people!
I think I’ll go download some Somerset Maugham on my Kindle.
I appreciate the input.
I will say, however, the drink I concocted became easier and easier to love the more sips I took.
And did you have just one? Or are there plans for more later?
Well there’s alcohol for you 
That’s why I always drink a good Scotch before I drink something like Talisker.
Something else they drink in these parts, in wintertime (apart from mulled wine, glogg, mulled ale and lambswool)
is a mug of stock with some alcohol in it. The stock tends to be a bouillon cube, or half a bouillon cube. The alcohol is anything stronger than table-wine. Port, sherry, brandy, QC fortified wine, you name it.
I don’t know it there’s a name for it. A Stock Toddy, perhaps.
Perhaps a “Stock in Trade Toddy” Trading the cloves, lemon and honey, (plus butter sometimes) for stock.
My FIL loved hot spiced mead, miód pitny, during the winter after a good day of XC sking, a little Drambuie added don’t hurt neither.
The original formula, in top post, is better (imo) with cognac, as I’ve now discovered.
Hopefully a VSOP or better yet an XO?