The Secrets to a Superior Old Fashioned
Whiskey. Sugar. Bitters. Three ingredients, endless permutations.
It’s Old Fashioned Week, so let’s talk about Old Fashioneds.
Like Negroni Week, Old Fashioned Week is a brand-sponsored event — in this case by the excellent, reliable Heaven Hill bourbon Elijah Craig — but it’s also just an excuse to make and drink Old Fashioneds.
The Old Fashioned looms large in this newsletter’s mindspace: The very first edition was about how everything can be an Old Fashioned, and the Old Fashioned is almost certainly the cocktail I have made most often over the course of the last decade.
It was, of course, the original cocktail, and although it has gone through a number of permutations over the years, it has remained a central part of the cocktail kingdom in nearly all its forms.
When the drink first came on the scene in the early 1800s, it was just a way to sweeten and flavor whiskey with sugar and bitters. There was no ice involved, no syrup, just sugar and bitters in a glass, plus a bottle of whiskey, which customers could, in some cases, pour at their leisure.
In the aftermath of Prohibition, the drink became an ungainly, elaborate mess, with large amounts of sugar or syrup, plus a finger or three of club soda, all garnished with what has been described as “fruit salad,” even as bitters were sometimes omitted entirely. It was sweet, carbonated, and heavy with fruit. There was usually some sort of whiskey (or, in Wisconsin, brandy) in the mix too.
A decade or so ago, when I first started making cocktails at home, some recipes you could find online still resembled this effervescent fruit salad more than the stripped down version that has since become the standard. In certain areas and types of bars that don’t feel the need to keep up with evolving tastes, you can still find unreconstructed versions. They’re not for me, but I am glad they exist.
For the most part, however, the drink has settled into a fairly narrow formula: two ounces of whiskey, a teaspoon or so of some sort of sugar syrup, and several dashes of bitters, stirred and served over a big hunk of ice, then garnished with an orange peel.
Yet even within the confines of this formula — or at least without straying so far from it that you’ve created a new drink — there are obviously superior versions.
Those versions tend to rely on a handful of tricks and techniques designed to improve the drink without fundamentally changing it. So today we’re going to look at the construction of an Old Fashioned, and several ways to spruce up the most classic of classic cocktails. Then, at the end, we’ll look at a flight of Old Fashioned variations that can help you understand the ins and outs of the drink.
Three Ingredients, Endless Permutations
The Old Fashioned consists of just three main ingredients, plus ice and garnish: whiskey, sugar (or sugar syrup), and bitters. Each one of these ingredients represents a choice, a fork in the road: What sort are you going to use? And how much? It’s a matching problem, and, given the number of possible ingredient options, the number of permutations is practically endless. So let’s narrow it down, ingredient by ingredient.