The drink of the season has arrived, courtesy of Frederic Yarm. We have not been able to keep this in our glasses long enough to take any aesthetic thirst traps of it, but it is very much the "fall in a glass" it set out to be: an apple brandy base with maple, benedictine, cinnamon, and lemon to round it out and give it all the spice and warmth you'd expect from such a moniker.
Most of our mainstay autumn-y cocktails rely on allspice dram, which has been nigh-impossible to snag in Virginia (thanks, state-regulated alcohol monopoly!) and this serves not just as an adequate replacement but as a worthy contender for Best Autumn Drink. I am particularly excited about how easy this should be to batch; a bottle of it seems a welcome addition to any sort of Thanksgiving get-together.