The Old Fashioned has been around for over 200 years, and generations of bartenders have tried to improve it. Some have succeeded. Some should have left the damn thing alone.
The Old Fashioned – whiskey, sugar, bitters, water.
That’s all.
Four ingredients. Nothing elaborate or fancy about it.
Just four ingredients, a glass, some ice, and about 200 years of accumulated wisdom suggesting we ought to leave well enough alone.
Of course, folks have never been particularly good at leaving well enough alone.
Especially bartenders.
And especially bartenders who have just discovered a new bottle of something weird.
But we’ll get to that.
A Little History, Because We Can’t Help Ourselves
One of the beautiful things about the Old Fashioned is that it wasn’t really invented. At least not in the way we think of cocktails being invented today; it grew out of the original cocktail idea.
Nobody emerged triumphantly from a back room, waving a mixing glass and announcing that they’d just created the next big thing.
The drink was, simply, the original cocktail.
In 1806, a newspaper editor in Hudson, New York, offered one of the most famous definitions in drinking history: a cocktail was a stimulating liquor made with spirits, sugar, water, and bitters.
Sound familiar?
At the time, this wasn’t an Old Fashioned. It was simply a cocktail, made with whiskey, brandy, gin, or whatever spirit you had on hand.
But then, as people tend to do, we started messing with it.
By the mid-nineteenth century, bartenders were getting creative. Liqueurs appeared. Vermouth showed up—new techniques, new ingredients, and new combinations. The cocktail was quickly evolving.
Somewhere along the way, drinkers began asking for their whiskey cocktails made the old-fashioned way.
You know, the way they were made before everybody started getting clever.
And just like that, a name was born.
It’s deeply amusing that one of the world’s most famous cocktails got its name because people were already tired of bartenders screwing around with their drinks. That reaction still says plenty about what makes it endure.
We’ve been having essentially the same argument ever since.
The Great Fruit Salad Incident
At some point in the Old Fashioned’s long, occasionally troubled existence, someone decided whiskey, sugar, bitters, and water weren’t quite enough.
Enter the orange slice. Then the cherry. Then the muddler.
Before long, the poor Old Fashioned was beaten into a fruity pulp at the bottom of a rocks glass, topped with soda water or, God forbid, soda pop, and sent out into the world looking suspiciously like a whiskey-based fruit cocktail.
Now, before the muddled-fruit crowd comes after me with pitchforks, maraschino cherries, and orange slices, let me be very clear. Drink what you like. Seriously. Wisconsin has practically built an entire cultural identity around its wonderfully peculiar version of the Old Fashioned, and good for them. If you like a little fruit salad at the bottom of your whiskey glass, who the hell am I to argue?
We’re not here to confiscate anybody’s muddler.
But the original construction has a certain elegance worth appreciating, because it proves the point so well.
Whiskey. Sugar. Bitters. Water.
Each ingredient has a job. Nothing is hiding. Nothing is there to show off.
When the balance is right, the whole becomes something considerably greater than the sum of its parts.
Which brings us to what really interests me.
Simple Is Not the Same as Easy
One of the great misconceptions about cocktails is that complexity somehow equals sophistication, when the Old Fashioned shows that restraint can be far more impressive.
More ingredients. More technique. More elaborate presentation. More things you’ve never heard of. Surely that must mean a better drink, right?
Well, no.
Sometimes it just means more stuff.
The Old Fashioned is a remarkably unforgiving cocktail precisely because there’s nowhere to hide.
Use lousy whiskey? You’ll taste it.
Too much sugar? You’ll know.
Not enough dilution? Congratulations, you’ve made yourself a very expensive glass of sweetened whiskey.
And the bitters? Those few little dashes that seem almost inconsequential? Take them away and watch the whole thing lose its backbone.
A really good Old Fashioned is an exercise in restraint. In understanding ingredients. In knowing when to stop. That is the point.
And that last part might be the hardest thing of all.
Because we bartenders are tinkerers by nature, we love experimenting. We love finding strange ingredients and figuring out what the hell to do with them. Give us a new amaro, an unfamiliar bitter, or a bottle of something fermented in a barn somewhere, and we’ll disappear behind the bar for an hour.
I love that part of this business.
We’ve made hundreds of cocktails at Speak of the Devil over the years. Some have been wonderful. Some have been genuinely inspired. Some have been…educational. And more than a few probably should have remained private conversations between the bartender and the mixing glass.
But here’s the thing.
The more cocktails you make, the more you begin to appreciate the ones that don’t need anything else.
The ones that have already figured themselves out.
Old Fashioned Does Not Mean Stuck in the Past
Now, I don’t want anybody thinking we’ve suddenly become cocktail fundamentalists.
Good Lord, no.
We’re celebrating Elijah Craig Old Fashioned Week, and Jack and Wyatt have put together two delicious variations on the venerable old drink.
That’s the other wonderful thing about a great classic: it gives you somewhere to start and keeps the focus on what matters.
Once you understand why something works, you can start playing with it.
Change the whiskey. Explore a different sweetener. Introduce another layer of bitters. Find an unexpected flavor that complements the spirit instead of burying it.
The trick is knowing what makes the drink an Old Fashioned in the first place.
It’s not about slavishly following a recipe written down in 1887.
It’s about understanding the architecture.
Spirit. Sweetness. Bitterness. Dilution.
A remarkably simple framework that allows for an almost ridiculous amount of creativity.
But creativity ought to have a purpose.
There’s a difference between making something better and making something more complicated, and the Old Fashioned keeps that difference in view.
And sometimes the most impressive thing a bartender can do is put down the bottle of obscure Italian liqueur, and just make somebody a really, really good Old Fashioned.
Maybe There’s a Lesson in There Somewhere
We live in a world that seems absolutely determined to reinvent everything.
Every week brings another revolutionary idea. Another innovation. Another thing that’s going to completely change the way we do whatever it is we’ve been doing perfectly well for generations.
Sometimes that’s a good thing. Sometimes it’s exhausting.
And sometimes I find something reassuring about a drink that’s quietly minded its own business for a couple of centuries while the rest of the world loses its collective mind.
An Old Fashioned doesn’t need to be relevant.
It doesn’t need to be trending.
It doesn’t need a rebrand, a marketing campaign, or somebody explaining its unique value proposition.
It just needs somebody who knows how to make it.
Maybe that’s why I love the thing so much.
Because underneath all the cocktail history and bartender nerdery, the Old Fashioned represents an idea that seems increasingly rare: simplicity done well is still enough.
Do something simple. Do it exceptionally well. And don’t mistake fuss for something better. That’s the lesson here.
That’s not a bad philosophy for a cocktail.
Come to think of it, it’s not a bad philosophy for a bar, either.
We’ve spent nearly nine years down here on West Fifth Street trying to figure out what makes a good neighborhood cocktail bar. We’ve tried plenty of crazy things along the way. Some worked. Some didn’t. A few are probably best left undocumented.
And we’re certainly not finished experimenting.
But the longer we do this, the more I find myself coming back to the basics.
Make good drinks.
Treat people well.
Pay attention to the details.
Give people a reason to come back.
None of that is particularly revolutionary.
Which, I suppose, is exactly the point.
So here’s to the Old Fashioned. To Elijah Craig Old Fashioned Week. To Jack, Wyatt, and all the bartenders who know the rules, and who understand that breaking them is what makes them interesting.
And here’s to the stubborn old cocktail that reminds us the best new idea may be a very old one.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I believe somebody has an obscure bottle of bitters they want me to try.
Dammit.