Make an Old Fashioned Properly

The Old Fashioned is the original cocktail: spirit, sugar, bitters, water. It was called that in the 1880s by men annoyed at newfangled drinks with vermouth in them. It is also the drink most often ruined, by muddled fruit, by soda, by a cherry from a jar, by too much sugar and too little care. Made properly, it takes three minutes and is the best thing you can do with a bottle of good bourbon.

The recipe

• 60 ml bourbon or rye, at least 45 percent
• One teaspoon of rich simple syrup, or one sugar cube and a few drops of water
• Two dashes Angostura bitters, one dash orange bitters if you have them
• One large clear ice cube
• A wide strip of orange peel

The method

If using a cube, place it in a heavy rocks glass, soak it with the bitters, add a few drops of water and crush it with a muddler until dissolved. If using syrup, simply add syrup and bitters to the glass. Add the whiskey and a few small ice cubes and stir for twenty to thirty seconds, until the outside of the glass is cold. Strain out the small ice, or lift it out, and add the single large cube. Hold the orange peel skin side down over the glass and squeeze so that the oils spray across the surface. Rub the rim with the peel and drop it in. Drink slowly.

The Old Fashioned is a test of restraint. Every ingredient a bartender adds beyond the five is an admission that he does not trust the whiskey.

The whiskey

A bourbon with some rye in the mash and enough proof to stand up to dilution: Wild Turkey 101, Four Roses Small Batch, Buffalo Trace, Woodford Reserve. For a drier, spicier drink, a rye: Rittenhouse, Sazerac, Michter’s. Save the twenty-year-old for drinking neat; an Old Fashioned made with a €200 whiskey tastes almost exactly like one made with a €40 whiskey, and the sugar hides what you paid for.

The ice

One large cube, as clear as you can make it, from a directional freezing mould or a silicone tray in an insulated box. A large cube melts slowly, so the drink stays cold without becoming watery over the twenty minutes it deserves. Cloudy ice from the freezer drawer works in an emergency. Crushed ice never does.

Variations worth knowing

Replace the bourbon with aged rum and you have a Rum Old Fashioned. With mezcal or a reposado tequila, an Oaxaca Old Fashioned, especially with agave syrup. With cognac and a sugar cube soaked in Peychaud’s bitters, rinsed with absinthe and served without ice, a Sazerac, which is the Old Fashioned’s New Orleans cousin and arguably its superior. Master the original first. It will take six attempts.