Old Fashioned
The Old Fashioned is the original cocktail. It’s been around since the early 1800s and people have been ruining it since. If you find your bartender or friend muddling fruits or topping with seltzer, throw that mess in the trash. Everybody wants to claim their recipe is the best one, but this one really is :-).
Ingredients
2 oz. bourbon or rye
2 dashes Angostura bitters
1 sugar cube
1 bar spoon water
1 maraschino cherry
orange peel
1. Put a rocks glass in the freezer.
2. In a mixing glass, muddle the sugar cube with bitters and water. If you don’t have a sugar cube, use a bar spoon of sugar.
3. Add the bourbon and a large ice cube (or a few small ice cubes) to the mixing glass.
4. Stir gently with your bar spoon for 30 seconds to 1 minute or longer. With this step, you are chilling the cocktail and providing dilution from the melting ice. Increase or decrease the stirring time based on your preferences.
Learn how to properly stir a cocktail from this fun guy:
5. Remove your rocks glass from the freezer and add a large ice cube (or a few small ice cubes). Using a cocktail strainer, strain the cocktail into the rocks glass over the ice.
6. Garnish with an expressed orange peel and a single maraschino cherry.
Notes:
When I say “a large ice cube”, I mean a 2” ice cube like this. Larger ice cubes melt more gradually then smaller ice cubes. In the finished cocktail, this means that the drink will stay colder for longer. That said, if you prefer more dilution, use smaller ice cubes during the stirring phase.
You want to invest in good maraschino cherries like Luxardo. It’s a more premium product than the cherries you find on an ice cream sundae. With its bolder color, you’ll look refined and not like a child.
Bartenders do a lot of fancy things with the orange peel like contorting and twisting it, making it into a spiral, lighting it on fire. I don’t know about any of that, but you do you, man.