The Old Fashioned may well be the first drink to be known as a cocktail. At the very least, it is served in a glass bearing its name, a short tumbler that contains between 6 to 10 ounces of liquid. The drink itself was purportedly invented by a bartender the Pendennis Club in Louisville, Kentucky, sometime in the 1880s.
I’ve read that the word cocktail was first defined, in an 1806 newspaper, as a mixture of spirits, bitters, sugar, and water. By the 1880s, cocktails were using all sorts of new ingredients, including citrus, ice, liqueurs, and more. It’s not surprising that a throwback cocktail came into vogue at that time.
Now, I’m only guessing here, but I imagine that in the 1880s, someone ordered a drink at the Pendennis Club, specifying a cocktail made the old-fashioned way, and the name stuck. I didn’t read that anywhere, I’m just hypothesizing, but I suspect that the Old Fashioned cocktail originated along those lines. Perhaps someone asked for an old-fashioned drink, and the bartender obliged him– the specifics are lost to the ravages of time, but I would not be at all surprised if it went down something along those lines.
Regardless of its origin, a properly made Old Fashioned truly epitomizes what a cocktail ought to be– liquor, bitterness, and sweetness, with water to balance the flavors, mixed together to create a complex whole that is greater in taste than the sum of its parts.
Not only is there no agreement as to its origin, neither is there a definitive recipe for an Old Fashioned. Some bartenders add soda water, others plain water, some add no water at all. Some use a sugar cube, others use simple syrup. Some use a maraschino cherry, others just the juice from the maraschino cherry container, others use neither. Some use an orange, some don’t. Everyone agrees that bitters are required, but some use Angostura bitters, while some prefer orange bitters; some even use both. Most use bourbon, some choose rye. In short, there is no consensus as to what makes for a proper Old Fashioned.
Go back in time far enough, and you will find that an Old Fashioned cocktail wasn’t specifically a whiskey cocktail. It was commonly made with just about any base spirit, though whiskey was probably always the most popular. The simple combination of booze + bitter + sweet + water works just as well with brandy (still the de facto Old Fashioned spirit in Wisconsin), tequila, rum, and even genever, an older version of gin.
I’ve tried all sorts of configurations, and have settled on the following as my own particular favorite method for mixing one, along with the notes I made during the process of perfecting the drink.
The Old-Fashioned
Defining Traits
– spirit driven
– heat balanced sweetness
– seasoned with bitters
Ingredients
2 oz. Bourbon
.25 oz. Demerara Gum Syrup
3 dashes Angostura Bitters
1 slice Orange Peel
1 slice Lemon Peel
1 Maraschino Cherry
Technique
Stirring— since the drink will be served over ice, you want to under-dilute a bit when you stir. Stir to the point where the drink is cold and the ingredients are well-mixed, but you have not achieved full dilution. That will happen over time in the glass.
Garnish— Express the orange peel over the drink’s surface, then rub the exterior of the peel around the rim of the glass. Flame the lemon oil as it expresses over the drink, but don’t rub the rim with the lemon, which is less sweet and more pungent than the orange, and can negatively affect the drinker’s palate. Twist both peels together and place in the drink, then lay the cherry atop the peels.
The drink is served in a double old-fashioned glass over one large cube of ice. The larger glass allows the cube to rest below the rim of the glass and on the bottom of the glass, without bobbing around in the drink. A floating ice cube dilutes faster.
Balance in an Old-Fashioned is achieved by bridging the core flavor (whiskey) with the seasoning (bitters), with sugar. The sugar tamps down the heat of the spirit, and brings out the spice of the bitters.
The most common spirit in an Old-Fashioned is American whiskey. I use bourbon, but rye works just as well, as does any sort of whiskey.
The drink used to be made by muddling a bitters-soaked sugar cube into the spirit, but sugar does not easily dissolve in alcohol, and you’re left with a clump of sugar at the bottom of the glass, and an unbalanced drink. Using sugar syrup speeds up the process of making the drink, and allows the sugar to fully integrate into the drink.
Many drinkers, especially older ones, expect that drink when they order an Old-Fashioned, so you should always clarify what drink they expect, just as you ascertain whether a patron wants gin or vodka in a Martini. That once-new but now old-fashioned style of Old-Fashioned has come to be known as a Sinatra Old-Fashioned, because it’s what he drank, and what was popular in his era.
Sinatra Old-Fashioned
2 oz. Jack Daniels Tennessee Whiskey
3 dashes Angostura Bitters
1 sugar cube
1 orange slice
1 Maraschino cherry
Place the orange slice, cherry, and sugar cube in the bottom of an old-fashioned glass, add the bitters, and muddle until it is thoroughly mashed up. Add the whiskey and stir. Fill the glass with ice cubs, and top with soda water. Serve with a straw.
Some Notes on Whiskey
American Whiskey
– one of the most tightly regulated spirits on the planet
– high baseline standard, i.e. even the worst ones are decent
– high level of consistency within different styles
American whiskeys are all made in the same fashion. Cereal grains, predominantly corn, rye, wheat, and/or barley, are malted— a process wherein grains are germinated, converting their starch into sugars— and then fermented and distilled in either pot stills or continuous column stills. Most are aged in oak barrels.
mashbill – how much corn, rye, and/or wheat went into a whiskey
– corn creates a perception of sweetness
– rye creates a distinct spiciness
– wheat creates a delicate softness
Bourbon
– made with 51% of more corn in the mashbill
– made using the sour mash process, where a small amount of the previous grain mash is added to each new fermentation
Rye
– made with 51% of more rye in the mashbill
Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey
– made with the sour mash process
– undergoes the Lincoln County process, where the spirit is filtered through maple charcoal before aging in oak barrels
Jack Daniels and George Dickel are the two most well-known Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskeys.
Wheat Whiskey
– made with 51% of more wheat in the mashbill
Bernheim is the most prominent of the few wheat whiskeys on the market. Maker’s Mark, Old Weller, Old Fitzgerald, and Pappy Van Winkle have a high concentration of wheat, but less than 51%.
Bitters
Aromatic – dense, sweet base, bitter backbone, spice component
Citrus – based around a citrus ingredient
Savory – complexity from pepper or vegetal flavors
Bitters play one of two roles in a cocktail:
flavoring – cocktail equivalent of pepper
amplifying – the salt
Modifying the Old-Fashioned
The basic template of spirit+sweet+bitters is simple, and open to near-infinite variation. You can change the base spirit, or even use more than one base spirit in a drink. You can modify the Seasoning by using different bitters, or bittering agents, or modify the balance with different sugars, or substituting another sweet ingredient for the sugar.
Modifying multiple elements at once is more advanced, but changing two, or all three, elements is possible.
The Old-Fashioned Extended Family
Manipulating the template of the Old-Fashioned leads to whole new categories of drinks, all of which are connected by a focus on a core flavor, and contain only small amounts of sweetener and seasoning.
Champagne Cocktail
This is nothing less than an Old-Fashioned in which the whiskey has been replaced with champagne. Because Champagne is much lower in proof than whiskey, there is no need for any dilution, so the drink isn’t stirred with ice or served with ice. For this reason, make sure the Champagne is extremely cold.
Champagne
Angostura Bitters
1 Sugar Cube
Place a sugar cube on a plate or paper towel (bitters will stain most surfaces) and dash with Angostura Bitters until it’s completely saturated. Drop the sugar cube into a chilled flute and slowly fill with Champagne. Express a lemon twist over the surface of the drink, and drop it into the drink.
Julep
A julep is an especially refreshing Old-Fashioned which substitutes mint for the bitters.
2 oz. Bourbon or Cognac
.25 oz. Simple Syrup
1 Mint Bouquet
Hold an empty Julep tin by it’s edge, being careful not to touch the outside of the cup (oil from your hand will prevent frosting), and insert the mint bouquet into the cup and gently rub the leaves against the interior, using enough pressure that you smell mint, but not enough to bruise the leaves.
Add the spirits and syrup and briefly stir. Add crushed ice until the tin is about 80% full, and slowly stir until frost begins to form on the tin’s exterior. Top with a cone of ice and insert a straw along one side. Move the straw in a small circle to create a channel, then slide the mint bouquet into the channel so the leaves are bunched together and look like they’re growing out of the ice.
Cobbler
The cobbler is a drink of some historical significance. Dating back to the 1830s, it is the first shaken cocktail, hence the cobbler shaker being named after the drink. It’s also the drink that introduced both ice and straws to the drinking public. Before the cobbler, drinks weren’t served over ice, nor were they served with a straw.
A cobbler is typically made with sherry or some other wine, shaken over ice with sugar and some muddled orange slices. In short, it’s an Old-Fashioned with wine replacing the whiskey, and the orange slices, especially the bitter pith and citrus oils, replacing the bitters. Once shaken, it’s poured over crushed ice and typically garnished somewhat extravagantly, using an orange slice, a mint bouquet, fresh berries, and perhaps pineapple or other available fruit, and served with a straw.
Hot Toddy
The fumes from heated alcohol can make a drink almost impossible to sip, and heat increases the taste perception of alcohol. For both these reasons, we add extra water to toddy. The heat and added water require additional sweetening and seasoning, and the citrus in a toddy isn’t there for acidity but to season and balance the drink.
1.50 oz. Bourbon, Cognac, or Rum
.75 oz. Honey Syrup
.25 oz. Lemon Juice
1 dash Angostura Bitters
4 oz. Boiling Water
Garnish with grated nutmeg and 2 lemon wedges
Toddies can be made with nearly any spirit as their base, and are especially good with brandy or rum, and even genever. During the winter months I often set up a separate hot toddy bar at parties, and offer guests a choice of base spirit.
Sazerac
The venerable New Orleans take on the Old-Fashioned, the Sazerac pre-dates the Old Fashioned, and dates back at least to the 1850s, and possibly as far back as the mid-1830s. It began life as a cognac drink, but by the late 1860s to mid 1870s, after The Great French Wine Blight, a phylloxera outbreak that made French cognac nearly impossible to get, it had become a rye-based drink:
2 oz. Rye or Cognac, or 1 oz. of each
.25 oz. Demerara Gum Syrup
5 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters
Absinthe or Herbsaint
The drink is stirred with ice, then strained into an ice-cold rocks glass that has been misted or coated with absinthe, currently illegal to purchase in the U.S., or Herbsaint (an absinthe substitute from New Orleans that was created to replace absinthe in the Sazerac when absinthe was outlawed in 1912).
A lemon twist is expressed over the drink then discarded. Note that a Sazerac is served without ice, so, unlike an Old-Fashioned, it must be stirred to full dilution and coldness.
Absinthe
While absinthe can be drunk on its own, typically diluted with water and with sugar added, it’s most often used in a manner similar to bitters— in dashes, teaspoons. Because it is high proof, absinthe clings to the side of a glass, so rinsing is effective as a rinse to a glass. In small doses, absinthe adds a bright, herbal flavor, and adds a layer of complexity to a drink. Although it can’t be legally manufactured or sold in the U.S., you can legally import some. I have found a couple European distributors that will ship to the U.S., and always keep a few bottles on hand.
And there you have it, way too much information about a cocktail you probably never gave much thought to before this. I hope it was helpful information, and I hope you try making it yourself. If you do, experiment! Fine tune my recipes to suit your particular tastes.
My final advice: be wary if you order this drink in a bar. I have found it nearly impossible to find a good one, and it’s nearly always a mediocre version of the Sinatra Old Fashioned. If you know of a bar that serves a top notch classic Old Fashioned, please tell me!
As always, coals to Newcastle!
Nice!
You know your drinks up, down, back, and forth, don’t you? God bless! Crystal
Pour me one!
That sounds like fun, trying a bunch of drinks to pick the way you best like it.
It’s actually really nice that you have a firm opinion about what you like. Most people just accept anything that is placed in front of them.