A Fruity Bourbon Old Fashioned
A Fruity Bourbon Old Fashioned
A pineapple and whiskey sipper that brings a tiki sensibility to a fall drink.
In recent weeks, we’ve looked at a number of historical Old Fashioned variations that use small additions to add flavor and complexity to the basic three-ingredienta template.
The Toronto is an Old Fashioned dating back to the first part of the 20th century laced with bitter, minty Fernet-Branca.
The Improved Whiskey Cocktail is a drink in the Old Fashioned family from the 1800s that adds absinthe and maraschino liqueur to the formula.
The Improved Brandy Cocktail, from the same era, does the same but for a brandy Old Fashioned.
All of these drinks share an ethos, a structural sensibility. They are Old Fashioneds plus something else — and that something else gives the drink a unique character.
This week, I want to take a look at a modern Old Fashioned that uses the same trick to take the drink in a very different direction with excellent results.
It’s a fruited Old Fashioned that adds pineapple — via pineapple liqueur — to the mix, along with a specialized bitters, taking a basic version of the drink in an almost tiki-ish direction. It’s delicious and delightful, an excellent drink for stubbornly warm late October days, when it looks like fall but still feels like the tail end of summer.1
Like so many rigorously made cocktails, it’s a drink that suggests a format, a repeatable, modifiable structure for making other similar drinks in a niche subcategory that I think of as the Fruited Old Fashioned. It’s also a compact lesson in how to think about imagining and inventing new cocktail recipes.
And just as importantly, it has a very funny name.
How Cocktails Are Like Magazine Articles
Before we get to the drink itself, however, I want to talk a little bit about how cocktails come into being. The short version is that before they are recipes, they often begin as concepts, as describable ideas. The trick, then, is to figure out how to build a cocktail that lives up to that idea.
This week’s drink comes from the third Death & Co. book, Welcome Home. It’s one of the simplest drinks in the book, and one of the best.
Released during the pandemic, Welcome Home bills itself as a how-to guide for aspiring cocktail bartenders that home cocktail aficionados can adapt and modify for home use. Not only does it take readers through every step of the drink conceptualization and creation process, it also offers a theoretical approach to tasks like laying out a workspace for making cocktails. It also offers some hints into the bar’s menu creation process.
On first glance, the last bit might seem mostly irrelevant for home bartenders, since even the most ambitious of us are probably not laying out 25-drink matrixes that need to balance a variety of ingredients, styles, presentations, and tastes.2
(Basically, you don’t want a menu that’s all bourbon drinks or all banana-Cynar drinks or all Daiquiris or all Negronis. Okay, okay…maybe you want a menu that’s all Negronis. But that’s not what they’re trying to do. )
In any case, there’s a really interesting, almost throwaway note from the book that’s worth dwelling on for a moment: These days, the bar’s menus are made before the drinks themselves are finalized. During the menu creation process, they take what are essentially pitches for drink concepts, with “rough, untested recipes.” But they work out the recipe specifics later, often over a number of tries, which you can think of as edits or drafts.
As soon as I read this, it made perfect sense: In my day job as a magazine editor, I help plan the contents of a magazine, often many months in advance. When planning an issue, the goal is to deliver a balance of topics and styles, tones and lengths, while also maintaining a consistent worldview and ethos.
We also rely on article concepts and pitches — rough sketches of ideas for pieces that writers will then need to execute. The point is that we come up with the idea first, with an end product in mind, and then someone has to go make the thing that was imagined, pitched, and approved.
You see this sort of process all over the business world, especially but not only in media: The production guide for YouTube megastar Mr. Beast that recently made the rounds on the internet talked extensively about producing videos with headlines and thumbnails decided in advance. I’ve heard of large companies that require executives to produce full marketing spec sheets for products before greenlighting their development. Movies are pitched with a title and a logline (a brief description with a clear hook) along with a script.
All of these things may change somewhat during development or production. But the point is to begin with the end in mind — to imagine that final form, hold it in your head, and then start building it in reality.
Or, in the case of cocktails, pouring it into a glass.