By Dave Willhite
In my job as a bartender, people often ask for an Old Fashioned. But what exactly is an Old Fashioned Cocktail? And why is it branded as being old fashioned? To really answer these questions we need to go back to near the time of the birth of our nation and the very origins of the word “cocktail.” There is much debate on the provenance of the word “cocktail” itself, and it’s worth diving into the one of the origin stories. This one, my favorite, comes from cocktail historian and author David Wondrich. He said, “I actually know where ‚Äòcocktail’ came from‚Ķ Ginger was used in the horse trade to make a horse stick its tail up‚Ķ If you had an old horse you were trying to sell, you would” give it some ginger, “and it would cock its tail up and be frisky. That was known as “cock-tail.” It became‚Ķ [s]omething to cock your tail up, like an eye-opener.”
Now that we know where the word “cocktail” comes from, I think it’s just as important in the quest to figure out exactly what an Old Fashioned Cocktail is, to know when cocktail first arrived on the scene. The earliest known print of the word cocktail comes from The London Telegraph, in which it was mentioned on March 20, 1798. That being said, whether or not the article was actually speaking of “cocktail” as the alcoholic beverage as we know it today is still up for debate. According to Wondrich, the first mention of cocktail as an alcoholic beverage appears in an April 28, 1803, article from the Vermont publication The Farmer’s Cabinet. That article sparked the question: What is a cocktail? This question gets definitively answered a bit more than three years later in the May 13, 1806, edition of Balance and Columbian Repository. The editor of the newspaper defined a cocktail as “a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind—sugar, water, and bitters.” Ah-ha! That’s it!
Around the late 1800s, due to all the many variations on the cocktail, there came a time when patrons at the local drinking hole just wanted a plain, old fashioned cocktail.
To this day, of course, cocktail enthusiasts and craft cocktail bartenders refer to this very definition. However, early on, as cocktails started gaining popularity, a wide variety of cocktail styles were developed. Fruit juices were added and sours were invented. Wine-based spirits like vermouth were mixed in, and Manhattans were created. Around the late 1800s, due to all the many variations on the cocktail, there came a time when patrons at the local drinking hole just wanted a plain, old fashioned cocktail.
That’s right, an Old Fashioned Cocktail is simply a cocktail crafted in the old fashioned manner: spirits of any kind, water, sugar and bitters. This famous drink was never intended to be classified as classy, or marked as marquee. It was supposed to be the simplest version of a cocktail, with just the necessary bare bones inside it. Through time, and the effort of some craft cocktail bartenders, it has received its status as a premier drink. It’s been branded many ways over the years, and this is just the most recent iteration of this classic cocktail.
— — —
When I first started bartending in the late ’90s, an Old Fashioned was 2 ounces of bourbon, a packet or two of sugar, a couple dashes of Angostura bitters, a maraschino cherry (those fake bleached and dyed ones you see on top of ice cream sundaes) and a slice of orange muddled together into a paste and stir with some ice.
Everybody likes it their own way, so I don’t want to say what recipe I feel is right or wrong. However, I will tell you what I serve when someone asks me for an Old Fashioned:
2 oz. of bourbon (I like bourbon with about 5 years of age on it)
.25 oz. raw sugar syrup (turbinado sugar works well)
1 dash of Angostura bitters
1 dash of Reagan’s orange bitters
- stir until cold and strain over a glass filled with ice
- I then squeeze the oil from an orange peel over the top of the cocktail
- sugar syrup: equal parts water and sugar (it’s ready when the solution is completely clear)
So there you have it, a very short answer defining what exactly an Old Fashioned Cocktail is, and was.
Dave Willhite is currently a Web Development Intern at 88 Brand Partners