Are You Friends, After an Old Fashioned?

In certain quarters, when discussing drinks, it’s probably best not to mention the Old Fashioned.

In the years before I started goofing around with spirits and cocktails, I was a lackluster home bartender. My martinis were all bad gin and too little vermouth; my caipirinhas were rendered lumpy and opaque by my confusing superfine sugar with powdered confectioner’s sugar, which typically includes chunk-inducing cornstarch; and my margaritas — constructed using a newspaper recipe I later realized was incredibly lame — had a sweetness and viscosity akin to that of a glass of Mrs. Butterworth’s.

I did have something, however, that I felt I made well: an Old Fashioned. Back then I didn’t know, or particularly care, that the Old Fashioned is one of the most venerable drinks in cocktaildom. It’s a combination that drinks historian David Wondrich has proclaimed one of the four pillars of mixological wisdom. I simply knew that it was delicious, an appealing way to utilize the bottle of Knob Creek I received for Christmas, and the bibulous answer to the question that had nagged at me for years: what are you supposed to do with those little paper-wrapped bottles of Angostura bitters?

Still apprehensive about my understanding of the drink, however, I eyeballed what local bartenders did when I ordered one, and saw that I appeared to be skipping several steps — some mashed maraschino cherries and orange slices in the glass, resulting in a sugary fruit salad that appealed to my inner five-year-old; others took the half-full glass of whiskey and ice and topped it off with club soda, making too much of a no-longer good thing. Still others employed both approaches, so that the whiskey was a watery afterthought and the fruit streaked the glass like smears of old lipstick; the resulting drink was so saggy and tired that it begged to be garnished with a lit Pall Mall.

What gives? I thought — it’s an old recipe, right? Isn’t there some agreement on how it’s supposed to be made?

This is perhaps the ultimate question today for many bartenders, bloggers and home cocktail enthusiasts (a much nicer term than “geek”, I’m reminded), and the mystery that has pushed so many into cocktail aficionado-dom in recent years.

I soon realized that the Old Fashioned is merely one battle line, albeit a significant one, in a much larger discussion among cocktail fans online that sometimes flared with passion (for regardless of the topic, the Internet has become no place for even-tempered debate). And while the subject of how to mix drinks is typically a pleasant one, the debates over proper recipes, spirits, tools and techniques that are conducted in person — typically over cocktails that have been exactingly described to an increasingly exasperated bartender — or on blogs or online forums such as eGullet and the soon-to-be-defunct Drinkboy forums, can sometimes veer into serious, clinically dry and even belligerent arenas.

Coming from the blogosphere and prone to geekish tendencies in every manner of my life, I of course initially followed and engaged in discussions on all types of spirituous arcana: can a gimlet be properly made without Rose’s Lime Juice? (The general consensus is no.) What is the true genesis of the Sidecar cocktail? (Short answer: who knows?) Can a style of cocktail shaker made by fitting two metal mixing tins together achieve greater mixological nirvana than a shaker made with a tin and a mixing glass? (Quite possibly.) And exactly how many drops of vermouth can dance on the head of a pin? (Jury’s still out.) Over the years I’ve formed friendships, and strained them, in heated discussions over the serving sizes of cocktails in London in the 1930s, and the styles and flavor profiles of the vermouth that was sold in New York at the turn of the last century.

I can already see the “get a life” comments this confession will incite (though really, is fantasy baseball that much cooler?) and indeed, there are times when ardent cocktail fans gather — whether in person at an event like the annual Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, or online in the Mixoloseum, a blogger-oriented chat room with an atmosphere and maturity level not unlike that found in a yellow school bus on the way to junior-high band camp — that, in certain circles, the geek-ness hangs so heavy in the air that there’s real danger a game of Dungeons & Dragons might break out at any moment.

But I’ve grown weary of what Internet arguments have become and I’ve largely put my days of cocktailian combat behind me (aside from a few sensitive topic areas that you really don’t want to press me on). Now, even though I usually spend my days talking, reading and writing about cocktails, I tend to approach them as Freud did his cigars: sometimes a drink is just a drink, nothing more and nothing less than a welcome distraction from the bristling cacophony of the world for a few minutes out of the day.

That’s when I come back to the Old Fashioned. As prone to becoming the subject of polemic, revisionism and endlessly repetitive arguments as any other cocktail — barring perhaps the cult-like madness that often accompanies the martini — when the computer is turned off and I place the whiskey and bitters on the kitchen counter, ultimately it’s just a drink. Not that I don’t recall the nagging questions as I mix, nor the ways I’m sure the drink would annoy partisans at polar ends of the mixological range: first a dab of sugar syrup in the bottom of a glass followed by a couple of dashes of bitters (hardcore Old Fashionedistas mandate the physical crushing of a sugar cube, possibly with a swath of orange or lemon peel); then a measured dose of bourbon or rye whiskey, depending on the mood; a quick stir for everyone to get acquainted in the glass, followed by large chunks of ice and, for that inner five-year-old with maturing tastes, a single bottled Italian wild cherry for color, rinsed of any cloying syrup. No muddling, no soda, no laborious frippery or careless sploshing of ingredients. For something that inspires such debate, its about as Zen a cocktail as you can get.