There is a reasonable argument that the Old Fashioned is not just the oldest named cocktail still in common circulation, but the drink from which all other cocktails are descended. The definition of a cocktail, first published in the Balance and Columbian Repository in 1806, describes a drink of spirits, sugar, water, and bitters. That is an Old Fashioned. Everything else is elaboration.
Understanding the Old Fashioned is understanding American drinking culture from the early nineteenth century to the present day. The drink has been simplified, complicated, bastardized, restored, and finally, in the hands of the craft cocktail movement, returned to something close to what it was when Kentuckians first mixed rye whiskey with Peychaud's bitters and a cube of sugar in the 1800s.
"The Old Fashioned survived Prohibition, the cocktail dark ages, and a decade of fruit salads disguised as cocktails. It emerged unchanged. Some drinks are simply correct."
Before the Name: The Whiskey Cocktail
The drink we call the Old Fashioned did not acquire that name until the 1880s. Before that, it was simply a whiskey cocktail, or sometimes a bittered sling, and the formula was settled early: spirit, sweetener, water, bitters. The four-ingredient structure was so fundamental that when mixologists in the latter half of the nineteenth century began adding curacao, absinthe rinses, and other elaborate flourishes to the base template, conservative drinkers began requesting their drinks the "old-fashioned" way.
The name stuck. By the time the Pendennis Club in Louisville, Kentucky, claimed to have invented the drink in the 1880s, it was already old. The Club's claim, which rests on the alleged role of bartender Martin Cuneo in creating the drink for Colonel James E. Pepper, is plausible as a story of the name's codification rather than the drink's invention. The formula existed before Cuneo. What the Pendennis likely did was formalize and promote it.
The Classic Recipe
The Prohibition Effect and the Long Decline
Prohibition, which ran from 1920 to 1933 in the United States, was predictably terrible for cocktail culture. The Old Fashioned survived it for two reasons: its simplicity made it easy to approximate with inferior spirits, and its association with bourbon and rye made it resistant to substitution with the gin that characterized most Prohibition-era mixing. When the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, the Old Fashioned was among the first drinks restored to serious bars.
The mid-twentieth century, however, produced a slow deterioration. American tastes trended sweet, and the Old Fashioned was adapted to meet them. Muddled oranges and cherries, splashes of soda, and generous applications of fruit syrup transformed the drink into something that bore the name but had departed significantly from the original intention. By the 1970s and 1980s, the version served in many American bars would have been unrecognizable to the Pendennis Club's patrons.
The Mad Men Moment and the Craft Cocktail Restoration
The Old Fashioned's contemporary revival has two origins. The first is the craft cocktail movement, which began in New York in the early 2000s and made a point of returning to pre-Prohibition recipes. Bars like Milk and Honey and Pegu Club in New York began making Old Fashioneds the way they had been made before the fruit arrived, and a new generation of drinkers found them revelatory.
The second origin is television. When Don Draper was shown drinking Old Fashioneds on Mad Men, which aired from 2007 to 2015, the drink acquired a cultural cachet that extended well beyond the bar-going public. Bourbon sales in the United States rose consistently throughout the show's run, and the Old Fashioned became the drink most strongly associated with that revival. By 2015, it was consistently ranking among the most ordered cocktails at serious bars across the country. Today it holds that position in every major city we cover, from New York to Chicago.
The Ongoing Debate: How to Make It Correctly
No cocktail in the American canon generates more passionate disagreement than the Old Fashioned. The fruit question, whether to muddle an orange and a cherry into the base or not, divides drinkers and bartenders with a persistence that suggests the stakes are higher than they rationally should be. The historical record suggests clearly that the muddled fruit version is a twentieth-century modification, not the original formula. The original is spirit, sugar, bitters, and water. The elaborations came later.
Our position at barsforKings is that the historical version is the better version, but that the question is ultimately one of personal preference, and that any bar serving either version with quality ingredients and care is serving a legitimate drink. What a bar should not do is present either version without being able to explain, clearly and without condescension, what they are making and why. For our recommendations of bars that handle this question particularly well, see our guides to the best whiskey bars in New York and Chicago.
The Old Fashioned's Legacy
The Old Fashioned matters not just as a drink but as a template. The Boulevardier is an Old Fashioned with campari and vermouth in place of bitters and sugar. The Toronto is an Old Fashioned with Fernet. The Oaxacan Old Fashioned, created by Phil Ward at Death and Co in New York in 2007, uses mezcal in place of bourbon and established a model for spirit-substitution variations that has been widely adopted. The drink continues to generate innovation two centuries after its first appearance, which is the most compelling evidence of its centrality to cocktail culture.
For a broader view of cocktail history, read our companion piece on the history of the Negroni, or explore the full range of classic drinks in our guide to cocktail classics every drinker should know. For the bars in your city where these drinks are made with the care they deserve, start with your city guide and look for our editorial picks in the cocktail bars category.
