Oh dear.
One of the most pointless controversies on the internet is the battle of over which spelling of whisky is the correct one. (See what I just did there?) You get the die-hards on each side of the Great Brown Liquor E Divide, each claiming their spelling is the “real” one, and then both are slapped around by the pedants with their “rules” about geographic origin, etc. More pixels have been pointlessly flipped on and off on the subject of whether whisky is spelt “whisky” or “whiskey” than on any other meaningless distinction except the one between Pinnacle and Three Olives.

But you don’t become a blogger if you aren’t amused by pointless controversies, so I was delighted to see Camper English of Alcademics and FineCooking.com take this one and jamb the knob to 11.

Don’t go feeling superior, reader!
You don’t start reading blogs if you aren’t attracted to meaningless controversy either!

You see, there also a distinction between the plurals of the two spellings. The plural of whisky is whiskies, and the plural of whiskey is whiskeys. Camper didn’t know this until he stumbled upon it. I didn’t know it until I read it from him. It is likely a legion of internet trolls and spelling nazis didn’t know it until now either.
But now they do.
Someone, somewhere, has just added this to his list of things to watch for, and make sure are corrected forthwith in every occurrence. So, fellow bloggers, better mind your ies and eys, or you will. be. set. straight!

Now, as I wrote shortly ago, we don’t have the same density of internet-obsessive compulsives monitoring cocktail blogs as other fora have. Nevertheless, this is just one more thing for that type to latch onto, bringing us just one step closer to critical mass… and the sweet traffic levels that would accompany it. Thanks, Camper!

Source: DC Beer

The first place we visited in Washington was Bourbon. We went to the Adams Morgan location (there are two). Adams Morgan is a youthful upscale neighborhood in the northern part of the District. It is rife with interesting restaurants, shops, apartments, and people. Bourbon is right in the heart of the neighborhood, so you could comfortably make it a part of a larger evening’s perambulations.

Bourbon does not have the feel of a “Craft Cocktail Bar”. With exposed, rough brick walls, battered dark wooden tables and bar, and fairly dark lighting, you’d think it was just a nice neighborhood tavern. You could, and I bet a lot of patrons do, enjoy a nice meal without ever realizing quite what is going on here. I found that to be very pleasant, both in concept and execution. This is a place where the cocktailian can bring his buddies who think the whole “drinky thing” is silly, and everybody will still be happy. The food (which to our sorrow the next morning, we did not eat enough of, early enough) is very well executed tavern fare, tweaked to the upscale. What little we did eat was excellent, in particular the sweet potato chips. It is damn hard to make sweet potato chips with the same consistency and texture as those from regular potatoes, and they succeeded about as well as I’ve ever seen. The sliders were also delicious and symbolized the same balance as Bourbon’s decor: They were superficially ordinary enough to make the conventional diner happy, with just enough subtle twist to give the more adventurous something to hang his hat on.

Once you start delving into the drinks menu, the place becomes really interesting for folks like me. While the cocktail list is all interesting-looking originals, the real strength here is the spirits selection, especially the bourbons (duh). There are four pages of bourbons, ryes, scotches, and other whisk(e)ys. All are offered as two ounce pours, and most can also be tried in half ounce tots as well. If you want to expand your whiskey experience, you could not choose a better, more practical environment to try what the world has to offer. (Actually, you can, but that’s the next post.) If you want a little help with you whiskey adventures, they offer a variety of pre-selected flights as well. There are flights to explore different schools of bourbon and rye, as well as between entire different spirits. There’s also a fight of reserves for $40 bucks that I wish I’d felt flush enough to try.

Bourbon was a great environment to meet up with friends, with its manageable light and noise levels, and that is what we did. We had planned to meet Chris Hwalek and Matt Hamlin here, and SeanMike Whipkey also managed to make it moments after we arrived. As an added bonus, through the magic of a Twitter mention of our destination, Jake Parrott joined us as well. Both the booths and the bar are conducive to amorphous groups, so it was a good choice for our launching point upon a nation’s worth of bar hopping.

SeanMike, the PeguWife, Chris, and Matt

In conclusion, Bourbon is a great place for a light meal, and certain kinds of serious drinking. The whiskey selection is slightly over the top, and the rest of the inventory is extensive as well. There is a good selection of beer and wine too, for the amateurs. It is not a destination for an evening of mixology, however. Their cocktails are interesting and very well-made, but they are not the focus of the operation. For a Washington-area resident, Bourbon should definitely be part of your bag of tricks when planning your night life. For visitors, I’d recommend it highly if you are a whiskey aficionado, but there are places I’d send you to first for more adventurous food and especially cocktails.

This review is part of my larger Great Cross-Country Bar Crawl series. Here is the main post for our Washington stop, with links to all reviews for DC.

To kickoff Maggi’s and my Great Cross-Country Barcrawl, we took a guided tour of the Four Roses distillery in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. Four Roses is a small major bourbon maker of whom I’d never heard until about a year ago, when I spied a bottle of their Small Batch product on a shelf and brought it home. I’ve already written whimsically of the story of the brand, and how a product this good, which for about a decade sported a Coca Cola-sized neon billboard in the heart of Time Square, could be so obscure. This post is about the product as it is today.

Four Roses markets seven different products. Two are available only in Japan, and for an explanation of that, see my previous post referenced above. The rather unique thing about Four Roses’ production is that while they make seven products, they actually produce ten different bourbons. They then combine these bourbons in differing degrees to produce the products.
Each of the bourbons produced has a flavor profile distinct from the others. To get ten different bases, Four Roses uses two distinct mash bills, one which contains 20% rye, and the other which has an exceptionally high 35% rye content. In combination with each of these mash bills, they maintain 5 completely separate yeast strains which originated in five different distilleries with historical connections to the brand. Each strain confers a unique character to the resulting product.

Brent Elliot, Four Roses quality control manager, took us through an incredible tasting experience. We had a chance to taste several of the individual bourbons to compare the differences the distinct yeast strains make in the same mash bill and the difference the mash bills make with the same yeast. Also, we had the rare chance to taste side by side the same recipe as both a white whiskey and aged. And throughout the tasting, we had a long discussion of the laboratory techniques used to control the quality and consistency of a product that is essentially alive for a good portion of its manufacture. It was interesting and somewhat comforting to see that, while laborious work with pipette and test tube has been replaced with pushing buttons on machines made by the Perkin Elmers of the world, the real decisions still rest with a group of well trained noses and mouths.

The resulting ten bourbons make for a tremendous pallet of flavors which Four Roses uses to blend some delicious products.

At one end of the spectrum, the main commercial product, Yellow Label, uses all ten whiskeys in varying percentages. At around $17-$18 and 80 proof, this is a very good everyday bourbon for a host of simpler drinks. If you do happen to have any residual memory of the Four Roses brand before its American resurrection, it is important to note that today’s Yellow Label is not your father’s Four Roses… it’s your grandfather’s. During the decades that Four Roses offered no straight bourbon in the US, Yellow Label was a perennial best-selling premium in Japan.
Four Roses’ Brand Ambassador, Al Young (more on him below) says that the distillery’s aim is to produce “Bourbons that don’t bite”, and they succeed. But it is not so smooth or sweet as to sacrifice character. It’s worthy call-brand competitor with the similarly priced Beams, Makers’, and Wild Turkeys.

The Small Batch was the first of their products that I personally had tried, and was the reason that I really wanted to tour their distillery. This big, delicious bourbon is a blend of four whiskeys from their pallet. Two use the high-rye mash bill, and two the low. They also use only two yeasts, the one that produces a berry-like overtone and the one that is the most spicy. Two mashes, two yeasts, means four components. Small Batch is a great craft cocktail bourbon, the Four Roses product that I’d most recommend the mixilogically inclined give a whirl.
The flavors are big and rich enough to stand out with and up to pretty much whatever you want to mix with it. I found it very nice for the fairly few whiskey-based Tiki drinks I like to make, such as the Port Light. The high rye content makes it worthwhile to experiment with for drinks that usually call for straight ryes. But don’t worry, this is still clearly a bourbon and not a rye. The round, cork-stoppered bottle with raised glass roses is lovely both to hold and behold.
This $30 bourbon has earned a permanent place in my inventory.

The top end Four Roses is their Single Barrel. This is, frankly, a monster bourbon. It is not a blend, but a bottling of one of their high-rye recipes. The whiskey has a powerful, rich, sweet, and deep flavor and aroma. Taking a good slug of it compels me to use a word I ordinarily hate, “mouthfeel”. Single Barrel has it in spades. It flows over your mouth and coats it. This means a very long and extremely comfortable finish. Nothing nasty shows up at the end here, unlike many other big and bold spirits.
Of course, at 100 proof, this Bourbon may not bite, but it will gum you pretty strongly. I think the Single Barrel is a bit too big for most mixing tasks, and I suspect the ghost of Paul Jones, Jr. would hunt you down if you wasted this in a glass with Coke…. It makes a fine Old-Fashioned, of course, and also works awesomely in a well-made Mint Julep, even without my usual addition of dark rum. Of course, at nearly $40, most people will reserve the Single Barrel for a sipping bourbon, in which field it is a formidable competitor.

Four Roses also offers private casks for sale, as well as Limited Editions of both the Small Batch and the Single Barrel, aged much longer and sold at barrel proof. I haven’t tried either of these. If you have, let me know what kind of an improvement they are over the regular equivalents.

Our tour was a private one, and bit more extensive than the usual excellent one they offer. But even if you can’t con them into thinking you deserve press treatment like I did, I recommend making a tour at Four Roses a priority if you make a visit to Kentucky and/or the Bourbon Trail. The distillery and the grounds are gorgeous. The somewhat anachrogeographic (is that a word?) Spanish Mission-style distillery building is on the National Register of Historic Places.
I’d like to end with a brief comment on our guide, Four Roses’ Brand Ambassador, Al Young. As brand ambassadors go, Al may not quite be Champagne Charlie, but he’s on a different planet from the more, um, common variety. Al has been in the distilling business for more than 40 years, working his way up through the ranks. He was the Four Roses distillery manager for about 17 years before becoming the brand manager. In short, he’s likely forgotten more about making whiskey than a lot of pros now know. He’s the first distiller who (with the aid of this cutaway segment of de-commissioned “beer still”) managed to make me really understand how a column still actually works. We learned a lot more about how bourbon in general and Four Roses in particular are made, but this post is long enough. I’ll simply wrap up by saying that he also has been a very active historian of the Four Roses brand, as you can see for yourself in his interesting and lavishly illustrated coffee-table book: Four Roses: The Return of a Whiskey Legend.

Four Roses has a good story and a better product. You should look into both. You’ll be glad you did.

A much better picture of the distillery than any I took. Click for a larger size and bonus, hilariously inaccurate, historical information!

The Liquor Fairy Was Here!
The following products, a bottle of Four Roses Single Barrel Straight Kentucky Bourbon and a copy of Four Roses: The Return of a Whiskey Legend, were recently provided to me as promotional consideration to encourage me to discuss them.
For a complete disclosure of my policies regarding promotional items and all other financial interests, please click this link, or follow the Liquor Fairy link in the header of this page.

In marketing, some brands seem to have a life their own. If so, then the life of the Four Roses brand is a sprawling epic of betrayal and fall followed by redemption after time in the wilderness.

The name Four Roses was born of a love story. Lawrence Jones, the successful scion of a Kentucky whiskey family, fell in love with a young belle who lived in Columbus, Georgia. He wooed her ardently for years, repeatedly asking her to marry him, always to be rebuffed… but never dissuaded. At last, he wrote her a letter that he was returning to her with the intent to ask her to marry him yet again. But this would be his last time, and he could hardly bear the thought of a final rejection.
Therefore, he implored her that if she would finally consent, she should arrive at the ball wearing a corsage of four red roses. If she did, he would be happy, and if she did not, he could retire from the event with his dignity intact and never trouble her again.
Of course, as with all good family stories of hazy authenticity, she swept into the ball adorned with four beautiful roses.

Needless to say, such a story became important to the family, so important that they named their flagship brand Four Roses. The Jones family were gifted rectifiers (blenders) of whiskey, and the brand enjoyed success in the days before Prohibition. While Prohibition brought the stories of most brands to a tragic end, the makers of Four Roses were quick to act, and purchased one of the few allowed licenses to sell whiskey as “medicine”. Thus the brand endured through the Noble Experiment.
When legal sales at last resumed, Four Roses found itself with tremendous advantages. It had a current, known brand. It had some financial resources. Most importantly, it had aged product available to bottle and sell.
The company used those advantages to the fullest, and by the end of World War II, was one of the nation’s most popular brands. If you look carefully in the background of the famous Alfred Eisenstaedt picture of the sailor kissing a nurse in Time Square on V-E day, the topmost sign in the world’s most famous outdoor ad space was for Four Roses.

My mother remembers that her father, a wealthy New England manufacturer, drank Four Roses as his favorite whiskey. My grandfather, J. Howard, was a man of moderate appetites, but exquisite taste.

Our tale takes its dark turn when the brand was sold to Seagrams in the late 40s, and this new guardian of Four Roses began slowly to betray its legacy. Tinkering began on the product, changing it to a blended whiskey of progressively lighter and blander character. Our noble, romantic hero began to fade as the brand slipped first into mediocrity and then decrepitude. Like a fallen bum on the Bowery, it found itself relegated to the cheap end of the bottom shelf, while its name faded from the living memory of the market.

And there it languished and would likely have died, forgotten and unmourned, except for a secret love it kept hidden away like a golden locket, secreted in a safe place under its tattered clothes. That secret was Japan.

You see, the real Four Roses, the high-quality straight bourbon whiskey, never stopped being made, and in large amounts. But it was all being sold in Japan. (OK, Europe got some, but Four Roses was a huge, perennial top-seller in Japan)

As the new millennium dawned, Seagrams completed it’s own rags to riches to rags arc and began to spin away it’s spirits brands and operations. Japan’s Kirin Brewing stepped in and purchased the Four Roses brand, the distillery where it was made, and about half its inventory of aged whiskey. I suspect Kirin’s management looked into the abyss of no more Four Roses, and moved accordingly.
The blended, artificial, whiskey-drink product was discontinued, and a comeback in America of the good stuff was planned. Any remaining stock of the old crap was bought up and destroyed. If you find any out there on a dusty shelf somewhere that they didn’t track down, put it down and back away. Such sad ghosts need not be disturbed.

In 2004, Four Roses returned to American shelves as a high-end whiskey again, with the introduction of a single-barrel bourbon. In 2006, they added the excellent Small Batch premium blend. Now they have reintroduced the Yellow Label as a mainstream straight bourbon. Finally, there are a number of single-barrel special bottlings, as well as private cask sales.
But Four Roses has not forgotten the country which kept the brand alive. There are at lease two major bottlings which still are available only in Japan. It’s not that they would not do well in the US market, but they simply sell there for so much more.
It remains to be seem how this tale will end. The name really was poisoned in the US, and few who remember the name are old enough to have fond memories. Will Four Roses be able to return as a major player with its Yellow Label? Will it settle in as a comfortable premium small brand?
But any good tale should leave you wanting to know just what “happily ever after” means…

I haven’t touched on an awful lot yet, there’ll be another post coming up shortly with some discussion of the excellent whiskeys that make all this bodice-ripping interesting in the first place, and how they are made.

Bartenders, for the love of all that is holy, please listen to what I have to say:
Quit shaking your goddamn Manhattans!
The Gospel of Whiskey is a simple drink, guys. Really, it is. It has only three ingredients. You can even speed-pour and get the ratios right. The garnish is cheap, easy, and beautiful. All you have to do is chill and dilute these ingredients, and put them in whatever glass your establishment has for cocktails. Voila! When you are done, you have created a monster classic cocktail which will have likely been requested by the more discerning and sophisticated of your customers….

…

So quit f*cking them up by shaking the damn things until they are a frothy goddamn mess!

I am sick and goddamn tired of having to spend more time describing to you how I want my Manhattan made than it then takes for you to assemble said drink, if I want it to look right in the glass and feel right in my mouth.
You. Stir. A. Manhattan.
It’s a clear drink. It should look like a glass of liquid topaz with a ruby nestled in the bottom when you hand it to me. It should not look like stupid, polluted beach water with a brown, foamy crust.
I have asked you for a cocktail that takes very little time to assemble. I think I’m f*cking entitled to you spending an extra few seconds with a spoon in your hand to ensure it is sufficiently and properly chilled. Yes, it takes longer to stir a drink into the twenties than it does to shake it that cold. But I’ve done the damn experiments, electronic thermometers and all, and it really is just a few extra seconds. 10-15 at the absolute outside, depending on the quality and type of your ice.

Stir. The. Drink.

See this guy?

He’s pissing me off. I want to jump over the bar and beat him down with the spoon he’s supposed to be using here. (Actually the bartender here is shaking a Grey Goose “Martini”, which is fine. But admitting this is mellowing my rant, so forget I mentioned it.)

My wife is always after me to make up cards with recipes she likes so she can give them to bartenders when I’m not around and she can get the drink she wants, made the way she wants it. Well, I’ve also decided to make up my own damn card to give to bartenders when I’m in the mood for a Manahattan. Here it is:

Actually, I haven’t made these physically because I am lazy, and because I have no room in my wallet. My wallet has no room because it is full of money for tips. Tips I give generously of when my Manhattan is not f*cking ruined by being shaken. The money stays in my wallet, leaving no room for said cards, because I keep getting shaken Manhattans.

So I wrote this post instead, so it will be read by all the world’s bartenders.
All bartenders read this blog, right? No? Well, if you know of such a non-Pegu Blog-reading bartender, give him this link at the very least.
Your next Manhattan will thank you.

Whew! That feels better. That’s really all it takes, guys and gals.

Stir. The. Drink.

Thanks.

…

…

Oh, and don’t forget the goddamn bitters either!

…

And enough vermouth, too!

…

And another thing….

The Age Your Own Whiskey Kit. Something tells me I don’t have the patience needed to really enjoy this….

The world of liquor is filled with contests of all sorts. Many prizes offered are lame, while others range from valuable to pretty awesome. I of course have a special affinity for the Basement Bar-centered contests, and I have covered a few past ones here. Three Olives ran a pretty amazing contest a while back called Show Us Your O-Face where the grand prize was an actual modeling contract.

Just a quick note to contest organizers: A contest like O-Face is a great way to populate your webiste with photos of hairy douchebags and/(hopefully)or cleavage!

Bombay Sapphire holds a very serious contest for professional glass artists each year in which participants attempt to create the ultimate vessel from which to swill gin.
But Bushmills has topped the lot of them.
Entitled Can You Make It At Bushmills, it works like this: You write a short essay and produce a quick video in which you outline your whiskey chops, and why you deserve to become a part of the Bushmills legend. (Hint, for best results, do not spell whisky correctly, i.e without the ‘e’!) Entries will be screened, and the best will be put up on the web for public comment.
A winner will be chosen from each of the countries where the contest is running. The winners will all be flown to Bushmills in Ireland for a three day adventure with luxury accommodations, some sight-seeing, and “Bushcamp”. In Bushcamp, the campers will undergo tests set by Master Distiller Colum Egan to demonstrate and expand their whiskey knowledge.
Sounds awesome, but that is not even the real prize!
The winner of this Masters Challenge gets to go back to Bushmills, this time for thirty days! And bring a friend. If married, you have a choice: Bring them, or update your FaceBook relationship status…. While there, you will learn about whiskey, the Bushmills way. You’ll even get to create your own custom Bushmills blend. The £5,000 you receive will either pay for a lot of golf while there, or perhaps replace some wages lost while you’ve been in Ireland being awesome.
Needless to say, I ain’t winning this one. But if you have sufficient brown liquor power, visit Bushmills FaceBook page and sign up!
(Hat Tip to Adam at Bookblogger: Taking the Pretension Out of Liquor, One Dick Joke at a Time)

So I was watching Modern Marvels on the History Channel last night. The Modern Marvel being profiled was Whiskey
Overall, it was a cool episode, but there was a two minute segment that had me wanting to nuke the entire network. Forgive me while I step away from Tiki stuff to prosecute one of the worst heresies I’ve ever witnessed against the Gospel of Whiskey.
There was only one drink recipe presented in the entire episode (at least that I saw), and it was of course for the Manhattan. So far, so good. If you are to present only one recipe, that would be it. But they let the rep from Canadian Club do the presenting….
Here’s the recipe this chuckle-head gave:

I’ll pause so you can leap from your seat, just like I did.
How awful is this recipe? Let’s review:

Canadian Club? Are you kidding me? I might be able to forgive this. After all, he’s a CC representative, what the hell is he supposed to do, suggest Knob Creek? And I actually made a Manhattan with CC myself over Christmas. My Mother-In-Law made me, so sue me. But it just gets worse from here.

Harvey’s Freaking Bristol Cream?!? Sherry? Cardinal? Pile some wood around a stake, please.

The producers damn well ought to expect this, in this case!

Where the hell are the bitters? I know there is a shortage on, but if you don’t have a couple of dashes on hand, may I suggest a Daiquiri? Make sure there’s a lot of oil on that wood, please, guys….

On the rocks? No. Just… no.

{This TIki TImeout presented in the spirit of Rule 4, and with a nod to the God of Cocktail Rule 4.}

OK, I’m going to advance a new cocktail of my own creation. Ordinarily, this is akin to a red-neck driver handing you his beer and saying, Y’all watch this! However, in this case I think I’ve got a winner, or at least an entry which makes the podium.
In a recent post, I reviewed Bols Genever. I detailed how I banged my head against the wall trying to figure this spirit out, and how I finally found some delicious ways to serve it up. As I was editing the post, there was some material I discarded about how many mixologists tout qualities in genever that liken it more to whiskey than gin. That got me thinking.
And for those of you wondering when he is going to pop up and make a snarky comment about that, I locked him in the sock drawer before starting this post.
One of my favorite cocktails is the Vesper, a drink that marries two spirits to tone down the more radical elements and create a lovely fusion. I decided to try the same with the genever and its supposed cousin, whiskey. If a Vesper is a Martini variant, I’d make this cocktail a Manhattan one.
After a lot of experimenting with tiny cocktail glasses and my dwindling bottle of Bols Genever, I found a recipe that I hope some of you out there try and tell me what you think. It’s not an every day drinker, since it is pretty strikingly flavored, but I think it’ll be a fine option when I’m looking for a bracer and have time to ponder what I’m sipping.
Finally, I had to have a name. My first thought was the Gen Ee Sais Quoi, since I really didn’t know what to make of this! But, meh. I wanted some romance. Now, Vesper was a beautiful double-agent, and British, like gin. As it happens, the most famous (if apocryphally) double-agent, Mata Hari, was Dutch, just like genever! Now, there are already a number of cocktails, and an absinthe, called the Mata Hari, so I looked Mata Hari up. Her real name was Margaretha….

I’ve really been in a rut lately, drinking basically nothing but Aviations of late.

Gee,
Pretty nice rut….

True, but a rut is a rut. I’ve been kicking around something new to try to work on and through a combination of circumstances which I’ll detail in future posts on this subject, I’ve found myself experimenting with perhaps the most appropriately named cocktail on (or off) the planet, the Old Fashioned.
Like all great cocktails, you can get into an argument about where it comes from. The traditional, fun tale is that the cocktail was created at the Pendennis Club in Louisville, Kentucky in the late 19th century. This is demonstrably untrue.
In 1806, a New York newspaper answered a reader question about how to make this new thing called, a Cocktail. They replied with a concoction that is for all intents and purposes what we now call the Old Fashioned. The Old Fashioned could just as easily be called The Original. But it wouldn’t sound as cool.

But I don’t want to diss the Pendennis Club. It does have an important place in the history of the Old Fashioned. By the late 1900s 1800s, the original Cocktail had likely fallen from favor, superseded by the winds and whims of fashion. One a fateful day, a member strode into the bar at the Pendennis. This man was likely a cranky, persnickity, but knowledgeable drinker, the kind who scoff at the pitiful ideas of lesser men about what makes a drink. In short, he was likely an ancestor of Gabriel Szaszko…. This guy sneers at all the drinks his fellow members are consuming (the Cosmos and Vodka Martinis of the time), leans upon the mahogany and demands of the bartender, serve me a damned Cocktail!
Of course, Mr. __________. What kind shall I get you?
I said I wanted a Cocktail. You know, whiskey, sugar, and bitters. An old fashioned Cocktail, like real men drank before we got all sissyfied in our drinks with shakers and fancy glasses! He likely went on to decry such trendy mixers as vermouth. And don’t get him started on crappy euro spirits like gin!
Another member, likely one who owed him money, decided to suck up and also ordered, one of Mr. _________’s Old Fashioned Cocktails, please. The name, as well as the drink, stuck. Over time, armed with a new, catchy label, the original Cocktail once again spread across the land as the Old Fashioned Cocktail.

So, if the Old Fashioned is the original Cocktail, Mr. History Buff, why isn’t it the Gospel of Whiskey, instead of the Manhattan?

Well, firstly because the Old Fashioned is actually a class of drinks. You can make it with a wide array of spirits, not just whiskey. We’ll examine that further in future posts. Also, while there may be an original recipe for the Old Fashioned, there really is no canonical best way to make one.

That said, let’s throw out a good version of that original formulation.

There you have a base, historical Old Fashioned. And, like most cocktails I love, there you also have a host of arguments.
No real controversy on the whiskey. Use what you like, just use decent stuff. You may find, if you start really experimenting with different formulations of Old Fashioneds, that different whiskeys will work better with different versions. If you find yourself constructing elaborate charts and matrixes of your results with different brands, seek professional help immediately.
That sugar cube is a problem, though. Yes, it is the traditional way of doing the drink. Yes, it is a cool preparation. Yes, yes, yes. But no. It doesn’t dissolve easily, and seldom does it dissolve completely. You may end up with the dreaded sludge on the bottom of your drink, and that is not classic. I go with the modern idea of using simple syrup to taste. Somewhere between a teaspoon and a tablespoon should do the trick.

Next, there is the question of oranges. I’ll discuss a lot of things you can put in an Old Fashioned in later posts of this series, but orange deserves a spot in the first go. For many, if not most, modern Old Fashioned drinkers, it is as much a part of the drink as the whiskey. I agree. Without something to expand it, the cocktail I outline above is just too sharp for my tastes. Please note, the orange the drink needs is orange peel, not juice. After you have mixed the sugar, bitters, and the first batch of ice in your glass, cut a good sized slice of orange zest with a channel knife or vegetable peeler. Do this over the glass so you catch most of the oils that will spray out as you make the cut; these oils are what you are after. Give the peel a twist and drop it in the glass. Then stir in the remaining whiskey.
If you don’t have fresh oranges, you can replace the peel and its oils with a good orange bitters like Regan’s Orange Bitters No. 6.This has the virtue of speed and convenience. You might also try Angostura Orange Bitters as well. I’d avoid trying to use the Fee Brothers orange bitters, at least in Old Fashioneds. The Fee’s is much milder and doesn’t really do the job here, at least for me. None of these bitters are as good as the fresh orange oils from a peel, however.
Finally, let’s talk garnish. You can make a perfectly good Old Fashioned with no garnish at all (should you employ the bitters option or the no orange option), and some traditionalists insist this is the way to do it.
The orange peel I suggest is an attractive garnish in and of itself, as well as a functional ingredient. You can even toss in a cherry with the stem on if you like.
The most common garnish for Old Fashioneds these days is a wedge of orange and cherry on a cocktail sword. While this little assembly is pretty by itself, I find it a bit fruity frou-frou for a classic, two century old drink. Sticking this massive garnish on your Old Fashioned is a bit like buying clothes for your grandmother at Forever XXI….

Hey!
You forgot an ingredient!

No, I didn’t.

Yes, you did! What about….

No. I. Did. Not.

…!

Don’t put club soda, seltzer, or any other unfrozen H2O in your Old Fashioneds, save perhaps for enough to dissolve your sugar cube, if that’s the way you roll.
True, lots of Old Fashioned recipes call for you to top up the glass with soda water. But you can tell that this is a B.S. ingredient from that telling phrase, top up. The simple fact is that a basic Old Fashioned recipe will likely not quite fill many Old Fashioned glasses. Bar patrons don’t like a glass that isn’t full, and bartenders don’t like to hear, Hey bartender, I’ll have another. And this time put some liquor in it. The simple solution is to hit it with the soda gun and everyone is happy, except someone who wants the best Old Fashioned.
Bartenders, add more ice and stir a bit if you must have the level approach the lip. Bubbles add nothing to the magnificent tranquility of this venerable drink. And if you are mixing your Old Fashioned at home, don’t worry about the level. You know how much booze you put in. Just stir and taste until enough ice has melted to give you the strength you want.
So there you have it, the basic Old Fashioned. Drink, enjoy, and come back to see what’s up as I examine some fun modifications, extensions, and variations in future posts!