The Old Fashioned Cocktail is widely regarded as the most important cocktail and for good reason. After more than 150 years of cocktail history, fashions and trends, the Old Fashioned is still front and centre in the cocktail world. It’s the epitome of perfect balance over complicated recipes and flamboyant presentation.
As my cocktail book will contain my favourite cocktail recipes, the Old Fashioned had to be front and centre. It’s my go-to cocktail a simple template of spirit, sugar bitters that gives you almost limitless scope for exploration and creativity. Even if someone was to wrongly assert that a “true” Old Fashioned has to be whisky, sugar and bitters there’s still more options than you could possibly explore in one lifetime.
Taking into account the thousands of whiskies available around the world, all the types of sugar and all the variations of bitters, you could make tens of millions of distinct whisky Old Fashioneds. Some would be only slightly different, others would be radically different.
This is what makes the Old Fashioned great to me: the template isn’t a restriction, it’s a guide to essentially limitless creativity. I’ve seen people do some quite flamboyant builds and presentation of Old Fashioned, usually involving fire or smoke. That’s fine but I’ll be keeping it relatively simple. A key question with an Old Fashioned is how are you going to add the sugar?
There are two main schools of thought with this, use sugar syrup which will integrate completely with the cocktail or start with a sugar cube or granulated sugar in the bottom of your glass. If you choose the latter method, the approach is to add a few dashes of bitters and maybe a dash of soda water and muddle this until the sugar has mostly liquefied into a paste. You add your ice, spirit and bitters to this and stir in the glass.
If you do this, the sugar won’t fully dissolve in the drink, the sweetness will vary as you work your way through the drink and there will likely still be some granulated sugar at the bottom of the drink. Some people prefer all of this – me not so much. I’m sugar syrup all the way, nit just to avoid the gritty aspect of sugar in my Old Fashioned but also because there are ways to infuse flavours into a sugar syrup that you can’t do with sugar alone.
Of course, there’s always Wisconsin style. Which is a… thing. I mean… I don’t like to be too harsh, but… why? I want you to know, I’m not angry. Just disappointed. Look, I hear the people in Wisconsin are lovely, friendly and outgoing. I just think they have bad judgement. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it. It isn’t even the muddled fruit that bothers me, I can see that being an interesting variation for an Old Fashioned.
But adding soda? FLAVOURED soda? That is no longer an Old Fashioned. I’m not saying it’s a bad drink but give it another name! A Brandy Lowball. That would be a good name. Anyway that’s a lost nomeclative battle so I won’t dwell on it.
There will a page in the book and a video dedicated to my favourite way to make sugar syrup, my spiced apple brown sugar syrup to be precise, but today is all about the Old Fashioned. I toyed with the idea of doing a complicated Old Fashioned riff but I’ve decided to go with a relatively simple whisky Old Fashioned.
But I’m gonna have a bit of fun.
The base whisky is going to be one of my favourites, Starward’s Nova single malt. This is 40% abv so I’m going to beef it up with a bit of the strongest whisky I have, a Texas single malt from Balcones that storms in at 66.7% abv. When it come to bitters, aromatic bitters are the frontrunner. Everyone knows Angostura but there are a range of aromatic bitters available from other makers. My top suggestions if you want to experiment with the bitters are orange, chocolate and walnut. And don’t be afraid to use a blend of any of these.
Enough talk, let’s make our Old Fashioned. In a mixing glass, I’m adding:
45ml Starward Nova single malt whisky
15ml Balcones cask strength single malt
10ml of my spice apple brown sugar syrup
2 dashes of aromatic bitters
And for a bit of fun, 1 dash of chocolate bitters
Add ice to the glass and stir for at least 20-25 seconds to get it nicely chilled and add a little dilution. Then strain that into a rocks glass over a big chunk of sexy clear ice. For a garnish I like to go with the classic: express some orange oil over the top, then wipe the rim with the peel and drop it in. Then add a maraschino cherry or two on a skewer.
And there we have the cocktail I’ll always come back to – the Old Fashioned. It tastes great, it’s easy to make and it opens a whole of possibilities for exploration.
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