N°01 · The Original Article
Old Fashioned
Spirit, sugar, water, bitters. The definition of a cocktail — and the drink that refused to be improved.
- Spirit
- Bourbon or rye
- Glass
- Rocks glass
- Method
- Stirred
- Est.
- c. 1880s · United States
Where it comes from — as far as anyone can prove
In 1806, a newspaper in Hudson, New York answered a reader’s question about a word that had appeared in an election notice: what, exactly, is a cocktail? The editor’s reply — spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters — is the founding document of the entire canon. For most of the nineteenth century, that formula simply was “a cocktail,” a morning bracer taken as readily at breakfast as at the bar.
Then bartenders got creative. By the 1870s the “improved” cocktail was in fashion — absinthe here, curaçao there — and a countermovement of drinkers began ordering their whiskey cocktail “the old-fashioned way.” The protest became the name. A cherished legend credits a bartender at Louisville’s Pendennis Club with inventing it for the bourbon aristocrat Colonel James E. Pepper, who carried it to the Waldorf-Astoria — a lovely story undermined only by the drink demonstrably predating it.
“A stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.”
— The Balance and Columbian Repository, defining “cocktail,” 1806
The twentieth century was unkind — Prohibition-era palates buried it under muddled oranges, neon cherries and soda water — until the craft revival stripped it back to the 1806 spec. Its second act had a spokesman, too: Don Draper ordered little else through seven seasons of Mad Men, and the drink has sat at the top of the world’s best-seller lists more or less ever since.
Things worth knowing by the second round
- 01
The rocks glass is officially called the “old fashioned glass” — one of the only drinks in history to name its own vessel.
- 02
The 1806 definition appeared in The Balance and Columbian Repository, as a wry reply explaining a rival candidate’s bar tab.
- 03
Wisconsin runs on its own dialect: the Brandy Old Fashioned — sweet, sour or press — is the unofficial state drink of its supper clubs.
- 04
Bartenders split on muddling fruit to this day. The pre-Prohibition spec had none; the garnish went over the drink, not in it.
Famous company
Mad Men
Don Draper’s standing order — he even builds one himself, behind a rival’s bar, in “The Hobo Code.”
The Pendennis Club, Louisville
Still serves its claimed invention beneath portraits of the colonels who drank it.
Crimson Tide & beyond
The default drink Hollywood puts in the hand of any serious man at any serious bar.
Every “best-selling cocktail” list
Routinely ranked the most-ordered classic cocktail on earth.