The One Dollar Old Fashioned

As close as you'll ever get to a free cocktail...and it's delicious.

Happy Old Fashioned Week! 

One of the best things about the Old Fashioned is that you can make a good one for very little money. Indeed, to some extent, the purpose of the Old Fashioned is to dress up inexpensive whiskey, to add a bit of sweetness and bitter-spice to brown liquor that otherwise might not stand out. The Old Fashioned format takes cheap whiskey and — with apologies to George Thorogood — gives it a haircut and a real job. 

Officially, Old Fashioned Week is sponsored by the venerable Heaven Hill bourbon brand Elijah Craig. Elijah Craig makes an excellent Old Fashioned, with assertive notes of mint and cardamom. It’s a great bourbon, and I pretty much always have a bottle on my shelf. 

But a 750ml bottle of Elijah Craig runs somewhere in the $30-35 range these days, and sometimes even more depending on the market. In a world where liquor store shelves are stacked with mediocre $60 bourbons, it’s still a great value — but it’s not exactly cheap. 

Fellow Heaven Hill brand Evan Williams Black, on the other hand, is really, actually, truly cheap. 

As I write this, liquor delivery service Drizly lists multiple stores in the Washington, D.C., area offering handles — that’s 1.75 liters, or just shy of 60 ounces — for $25 or less. According to my journalist math, that’s less than 50 cents an ounce, which in the current universe of insanely inflated whiskey prices is so cheap it’s nearly free. 

Is Evan Williams Black the best bourbon? Not even close. (As if you could even define such a thing.) But its main fault is that it’s somewhat one-dimensional, without the depth and complexity of flavor that better, more expensive bottles offer. 

And you know what it tastes like? Bourbon. Not truly great bourbon. But pretty decent, good enough bourbon. You get notes of brown sugar, caramel, a bit of cherry, vanilla, and oak, with no one flavor dominating. It’s perfectly tolerable, at worst.  

Indeed, its no-frills, competent-enough basic-ness makes it especially suited for a surprisingly tasty, shockingly cheap Old Fashioned. 

Two ounces of bourbon, a little bit of syrup, a couple dashes of bitters, a wide strip of orange peel for garnish — the unit cost for a single drink is something roughly like a dollar, depending on how you cost out the bitters, syrup, and orange peel.¹ 

You can always upgrade your Old Fashioned with various tricks — blending your bitters, changing up your syrup, even mixing and matching the whiskey. But a basic-yet-well-made Old Fashioned, built with inexpensive whiskey, remains one of life’s great pleasures.

A dollar isn’t nothing in this world. But think of it this way? If you lost a dollar in a suitcase or on the sidewalk or one of those weird, oddly shaped storage compartments that’s now in every car, would you even notice? If your bank account suddenly had exactly one dollar less in it, but you had a delicious Old Fashioned in your hand, wouldn’t you be happy?

A pretty good Old Fashioned? As a man once said: I’d buy that for a dollar.

The One Dollar Old Fashioned might be the best deal in all of cocktaildom. Try one. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. And at worst, you’ll be out a dollar. 

One Dollar Old Fashioned

• 2 dashes Angostura Aromatic bitters

• 1 fat tsp (a slightly overfull teaspoon) rich 2:1 sugar syrup*²

• 2 ounces Evan Williams Black bourbon

INSTRUCTIONS 

1. Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass. 

2. Add ice, then stir until chilled, about 8-10 seconds. (Because this is a lower-proof whiskey, and you’ll be serving the drink over ice, which will add dilution over time, you don’t want to stir too much.) 

3. Strain into a rocks glass over ice, preferably a single large cube. 

4. Garnish by twisting a wide strip of orange peel over the top of the drink, expressing the oils from the orange peel onto the surface of the cocktail, then dropping the orange peel into the glass. 

*Rich 2:1 sugar syrup: Most of the time I use a syrup made from demerara sugar for Old Fashioneds. But since we’re going for low cost and ease of effort, you can use whatever sugar you have around. Ordinary white sugar, cane sugar, turbinado sugar — all work well. In a blender, combine two parts sugar with one part water, by weight, so for example 400 grams sugar and 200 grams water. Blend on high for 2-3 minutes, until thoroughly combined. Bottle and store in the refrigerator. Keeps for a month or more. 

Large Dogs Who Don’t Know It’s Old Fashioned Week But Are Very Happy It’s October

1. Pricing out a single cocktail prepared at home is as much art as science, but if you’re paying $25 or less for a 1.75 liter bottle, it’s hard to see how the unit cost for a single drink comes to significantly more than a buck. Syrup is just sugar and water; what does a teaspoon of sugar cost? Angostura bitters have gone up in price recently, but two dashes is just a tiny, tiny fraction of an ounce. A good-sized orange costs about a dollar and should deliver about 10 strips of garnish. Maybe — maybe — with stingier assumptions you could push the unit cost up as high as $1.50? Sure, that’s a lot more than a single dollar in percentage terms, but at times in my life I’ve paid $3 for a bottle of Coke Zero…that I didn’t even want. A buck and a half for a solid Old Fashioned is a steal.

2. If you don’t want to make your own syrup, you can also substitute high-quality maple syrup. Just try to avoid the “Butter Lite” class of highly processed syrup.