Old Fashioned

    

'Old Fashioned'

Via Vecchia Restaurant

Portland, Maine

If there is one thing I truly enjoy, it’s a well-made cocktail! And there is one cocktail that, for me, stands above all others: the Old Fashioned.  If I was required to write about how many times I was drunk at airport bars on Old Fashioned’s…well, we would need a terabyte (whatever the hell a ‘terabyte’ is).

The Old Fashioned is exactly that: an early version of the “cocktail”.  In the early 19th century, a cocktail was any mixture of spirits, bitters, sugar and water.  The Old Fashioned is claimed to have come about in 1890s Kentucky at the Pendennis Club.  Colonel James E. Pepper, a Bourbon distiller of some note, then took the recipe to the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

Traditionally, the drink is made by mixing a small lump of sugar with a little water in a rocks glass, adding two dashes of Angostura bitters, and topping off with a measure of whisky.  An orange peal is usually used as a garnish.  

There are plenty of variations to the classic Old Fashioned.  One of my favourites is to swap the whisky with Mount Gay Rum.  Another variation that has become very popular is the 'Smoked Old Fashioned' which infuses the cocktail with a magnificent 'woody' scent.  Many trendy restaurants in North America will have it on the menu, and it is quite a performance to see it made.

'Smoked Old Fashioned'

Polaris Rooftop Restaurant, Atlanta

If you go to any hotel or airport bar today you will see every red-blooded man over 25 ordering Old Fashioned’s.  The reason for this comes down to one man: Don Draper.  The fictional antihero of AMC’s “Mad Men”, set in the 1960s (when it was still legal to talk to a woman in a bar), drank then like a fish.  He was so cool and debonair that 8 years after the series ended men are still ordering them en-masse.

Is this why I fell in love with the Old Fashioned?

Yes.