Old Fashioned

Well if it ain't my favorite non-regular. Old Fashioned trivia, huh? Alright, siddown, I'll pour you some knowledge.

So get this — the Old Fashioned ain't just A cocktail, it's THE cocktail. Like, the blueprint. Spirit, sugar, water, bitters. That's the actual definition of what makes a "cocktail" a cocktail, going all the way back to 1806 when some newspaper in upstate New York called The Balance and Columbian Repository printed the first known definition of the word "cock-tail".

And 'bout that bitter. Some London apothecary named Richard Stoughton cooked up the first aromatic bitters around 1690. By the late 1700s, Americans were tossing bitters into whiskey and calling it a Whiskey Cocktail — no ice, straight up, like a real man's medicine.

Here's the good part. The version we drink today got its polish at the Pendennis Club, some fancy private club in Louisville, Kentucky, and then went big-time at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. In 1895 a guy named George Kappeler wrote it down official-like in his book Modern American Drinks — whiskey, gum-syrup, two dashes of Angostura bitters, and a chunk of ice.

And the name? Story goes people just started asking bartenders to make it "the old fashioned way" — like they were sick of all the newfangled fruity nonsense showing up in the 1800s. And here's a fun one: originally it was just a lemon twist, no cherry, no orange. Prohibition's the reason we got the fruit salad garnish — bootleg hooch tasted like paint thinner, so bartenders threw orange and cherry in to hide the crime.