![]() Pour in bourbon, fill with ice cubes, and stir. Muddle into a paste using a muddler or the back end of a spoon. Mix sugar, water and angostura bitters in an old-fashioned glass. This simple and refreshing drink is made by blending gin with fresh orange, lemon and lime juices, simple syrup and club soda. Its popularity increased when the TV series Mad Men aired, where the Old Fashioned is the main character Don Drapers favorite drink. It consists of alcohol, sugar, water and bitters, which is exactly what was originally seen as a cocktail. A favorite cocktail of President Harry S Truman and his wife Bess, it's enjoying a renewed popularity with the cocktail renaissance and as the signature drink of such fictional characters as Mad Men’s Don Draper. Old Fashioned is the very definition of a classic cocktail. Pepper when he introduced the cocktail to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in NYC. The drink was popularized by a club member and bourbon distiller, Colonel James E. The bartender, not wanting to serve a non-bourbon drink in Bourbon Country, concocted a drink that delighted the customer and still delights to this day. The syrup, fruit and bitters are muddled before ice and Bourbon are added.The Old Fashioned was invented in the 1800’s at the Pendennis Club, a private club still in operation in Louisville.Īs the story goes, a guest at the bar ordered a cocktail, but warned the bartender that he didn’t like bourbon. The concept of an old-fashioned dates back to the early 1800s and includes whiskey, bitters, cherry juice, sugar and water. The fruit is added to the basic cocktail of sugar and water, which comes in the form of a simple syrup. Several distinctive components make the classic Pendennis Club cocktail, most notably the use of Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey. 2 ½ ounces of fine Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey 1 teaspoon of simple syrup (made with a 2 to 1 mixture of sugar to boiling water) Typically served in a short, heavy tumbler, enjoy the Old Fashioned yourself at home with this recipe, as still used at the Pendennis Club today. Indeed, at some bars following the end of Prohibition the drinker was even allowed to pour whisky from the bottle into the glass himself. With the meddling of modern ingredients many asked for an “old fashioned” drink, demanding a return to basics - a way for “the old boys to get their money’s worth of whisky”, as the Anaconda Standard put it in 1890. Over the years the recipe for the Old Fashioned has shown flexibility, with the addition of cherries, oranges, orange juice, pineapple and even the replacement of sugar syrup with almond or raspberry syrup, often all shaken together and blended with whisky. Pepper is said to have brought his recipe to the Waldorf Astoria hotel bar in New York. From here, the barman and bourbon distiller James E. Thats three ingredients that can be swapped out - a different spirit base, a liqueur or flavoured syrup in place of sugar, and there is a myriad of bitters to choose from. Primary cocktail historians note that the Old Fashioned cocktail was invented at the Pendennis Club in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1889, a gentleman’s club that clings on to its original values still today, where “decency, decorum, civility, good manners and the social graces are still very much in style”. The Old-Fashioned is delightfully simple, just whiskey, sugar, bitters and dilution from melting ice. Described as a “fashionable accompaniment to the sporting life”, the popular whisky cocktail fit neatly into a lifestyle that approved of smoking cigars, chewing tobacco and playing poker, in addition to the elixir’s wondrous benefits to our health, as called out by the Indiana Progress paper, “a bourbon whiskey cocktail before breakfast is the best thing for complexion.” Well into the 1910s when Americans became more familiar with native liquors, the drink’s prevailing name was the ‘Whiskey Cocktail’, made in large batches and sold as a provision to the Union Army and officers during the Civil War (so popular it was even used in exchange for prisoners). Although stories vary on whether the first Old Fashioned cocktail was in fact made with Holland Gin (as described in the 1862 book by the American bartender Jeremiah Thomas, Jerry Thomas’ Bartenders Guide: How To Mix Drinks), the classic Old Fashioned as we know it is safely anchored in the whisky harbour.
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