Rye. Peach. Honey. Old Fashioned.
An easy drink for the end of a long week.
One goal of this newsletter is to explain how cocktails work and how you can make them work for you. There are a lot of recipes and discussions of ingredients, ratios, and techniques.
But another goal is just to program drinks for readers — based mainly on the season, but also on holidays, and, occasionally, notable cultural events. Inevitably, there’s a bias towards the East Coast, where I live, and America more generally.
In America, this is not a week for a difficult drink. Yes, I’m friendly with a lot of journalists and political professionals. My sample size is skewed by people who had to work the 2 a.m. shift on election night.
But just about everyone I know is semi-sleep deprived and exhausted. I myself was in New York for much of the week, up very late every night and early most mornings. It was a good and productive trip, and I even managed to visit some of the city’s — and the world’s — best bars. But I haven’t been this tired in a very long time. I foresee some early bedtimes in my future.
Also, a drink or two.
In times of exhaustion, well-made cocktails remain a wonderful part of life, little luxuries to mark the end of a long day, an exhausting week — or an entire era.
Even if you somehow managed to stay well-rested this week, there will probably come a time in your life when that is not the case. And when that time inevitably comes, you can refer back to this newsletter.
So we’re going to make an Old Fashioned.
Specifically, we’re going to make a fun, fruity, honey-tinged Old Fashioned with this newsletter’s favorite and most often-used bottle, Rittenhouse rye. It’s delicious, satisfying, seasonally appropriate, and incredibly easy to make.
It’s a fruited Old Fashioned, and you can think of it as a follow up to the Pineapple Old Fashioned we made recently, only easier to make.
Like so many of the cocktails we’ve looked at recently, it’s an Old Fashioned with a slight twist that takes the drink’s core idea in a particular direction, mellowing it out with honey and peach bitters.
It’s a great drink for the end of a long week.
Fruit by the Dash
When I wrote about the Pineapple Old Fashioned a few editions ago, I suggested that it could serve as a generalizable template for a fruited Old Fashioned.
The trick is just to take the basic, three-ingredient Old Fashioned formula — spirit, sugar, bitters — and add a bit of high-quality fruit liqueur and some sort of unusual bitters, adjusting for sweetness accordingly.
That produced a template that looked like this:
1 dash unusual bitters
2 dashes Angostura Aromatic bitters
½ teaspoon some sort of syrup
½ ounce fruit liqueur
2 ounces whiskey — or, if you really want to expand your horizons, other base spirit
In this case, however, we’re going to skip the fruit liqueur and focus on modifying the drink entirely with bitters and a slightly unusual but easy-to-make syrup.