Old Fashioneds
26 recipes, page 1 of 2
This Field Manual holds 26 recipes in the old fashioned family. The build is spirit, sugar, bitters and ice, stirred in the glass. It is the oldest surviving cocktail specification and the definition of the word before the word meant anything else.
What changes is the spirit and the sugar. Bourbon and sugar makes the version most people picture; rye and demerara makes a drier one with more spine. Swap the whiskey for rum or tequila and the build holds. The bitters are not decoration, they are the seasoning that stops the sugar reading as sweet, which is why leaving them out gives you whiskey and water.
Base Spirit
Difficulty Level
Almond Old Fashioned
The Almond Old Fashioned is a bourbon Old Fashioned with amaretto in place of the sugar, and the swap does more than sweeten. Amaretto is built on apricot kernels rather than
American Trilogy
The American Trilogy is an Old Fashioned with two spirits in it, and the split is doing more than adding flavour. Applejack was America's first spirit, distilled from orchards
Añejo Old Fashioned
The Añejo Old Fashioned is an Old Fashioned with aged tequila in place of whiskey, and it works for one specific reason: añejo has spent at least a year in oak, so it arrives
Black Russian
The Black Russian was mixed in 1949 at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels by barman Gustave Tops, for Perle Mesta, the American ambassador to Luxembourg and Washington's most famous
Canchánchara
The Canchánchara is Cuba's oldest drink and the daiquiri's direct ancestor: cane spirit, honey and lime, taken by the mambises who fought Spain through the independence wars of
Corn n’ Oil
The Corn n’ Oil is Barbados’s house cocktail, older than most of the classics and simpler than nearly all of them: falernum under, blackstrap rum over, bitters and a squeeze of
Fancy Free
The Fancy Free is an Old Fashioned that uses maraschino liqueur instead of sugar. Rye, 15ml of maraschino, and two kinds of bitters. That is the entire drink. The swap does more
French Connection
The French Connection is the 1970s in a rocks glass: cognac and amaretto over ice, named for the 1971 film that owned the decade’s idea of cool, and built for the era’s
Gin Cocktail
The Gin Cocktail is what the word cocktail meant before it meant anything else. The definition printed in 1806 was specific: spirit, sugar, water and bitters, and nothing else
Godfather
The Godfather is Scotch and amaretto over ice at two to one, and there is nothing else in it. It came out of the 1970s two-bottle wave along with the French Connection, which is
Hunter
The Hunter is rye and cherry brandy at two to one, stirred over ice, and there is nothing else in it. It comes from the turn-of-the-century books, where it sat among a run of
Improved Whiskey Cocktail
This drink is why the Old Fashioned is called the Old Fashioned. The original cocktail of the early 1800s was spirit, sugar, water and bitters and nothing else. As the century
Maple Old Fashioned
The Maple Old Fashioned is autumn performing the Old Fashioned’s single swap: real maple where the sugar sat, bourbon and bitters left constant. It is the folk-modern reading that
Monte Carlo
The Monte Carlo is a Manhattan with Bénédictine where the vermouth should be. Rye, 15ml of the abbey liqueur, two dashes of Angostura, stirred. Nothing else. Bénédictine is doing
Oaxacan Old Fashioned
The Oaxacan Old Fashioned is the drink that put mezcal on the cocktail map: Phil Ward built it at New York’s Death & Co in 2007, splitting the Old Fashioned’s base between
Old Fashioned
The Old Fashioned is the oldest documented cocktail in the American canon and the drink from which the word cocktail derives its original meaning. Its first print definition, in
Port Old Fashioned
The Port Old Fashioned splits the base: bourbon leading, tawny port second, and the port doing work that sugar and vermouth would do elsewhere. It is a whiskey drink with a wine
Revolver
The Revolver is a modern classic with an unusually precise birth certificate: Jon Santer, behind the bar at Bruno’s in San Francisco in the early 2000s, building a drink around a
Rusty Nail
The Rusty Nail is two Scotches talking to each other: whisky neat, and whisky that went to finishing school as Drambuie, honey and herbs smoothing the same spirit into a liqueur.
Sazerac
The Sazerac is one of the oldest documented cocktails in American history, originating in New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century and taking its name from the Sazerac de Forge
Stinger
The Stinger is cognac wearing menthol aftershave: brandy and white crème de menthe, stirred or famously shaken, and for the first half of the twentieth century the definitive
Ti’ Punch
Ti’ Punch, petit punch in Creole, is Martinique’s national drink and the purest expression of rhum agricole that exists: rhum, cane syrup and a coin of lime, built in a small
Toronto
The Toronto is the drink that taught fernet manners. It appears in the bar manuals of 1922 as the Fernet Cocktail, whisky sweetened and seasoned with Milan’s most feared amaro,
Welsh Gold
The Welsh Gold is a house Old Fashioned written for St David’s Day: Penderyn Madeira Finish on a large cube with Welsh honey syrup, two dashes of Angostura and expressed orange.