Old Fashioned

The original cocktail, unchanged since the 1800s. Bourbon, bitters, sugar, and an expressed orange peel. No bells, no whistles, just whiskey perfection in its purest form.

The Old Fashioned is the oldest continuously made cocktail in the American tradition, with its four-ingredient structure tracing directly to the first published definition of the word cocktail. On May 13, 1806, the Balance and Columbian Repository newspaper in Hudson, New York defined a cocktail as a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters — a formula that the Old Fashioned preserves with near-perfect fidelity. The name Old Fashioned emerged in the 1880s, when patrons in American hotel bars began requesting drinks made the old-fashioned way: spirit, sugar, bitters, and a small measure of water or ice, without the elaborate additions of liqueurs, fruit, and soda that had become fashionable. The Pendennis Club in Louisville, Kentucky has a longstanding claim to the drink's specific formalization in that decade, and Louisville's bourbon culture gives the claim geographic plausibility. The Old Fashioned's specific construction — a sugar cube or simple syrup expressed with Angostura bitters, the whiskey added and stirred with a large ice cube, finished with an expressed citrus peel — developed and standardized through the late 19th century and was codified by David Embury in his 1948 The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. It is an IBA Unforgettable cocktail, consistently ranks among the world's most ordered drinks, and is the foundational American whiskey cocktail against which every other stirred spirit drink is measured.