Old Cocktail Fashioned

Old Fashioned – Classic Recipe

Preparation time10 min  

Ingredients: 

• Bourbon 60ml
• Angostura 3 dashes
• sugar 1 lump
• Ice water or very cool 15 ml

Other ingredients:

• 1 Maraschino cherry to decorate.
• A strip of orange peel to decorate.

The first mixed drinks of alcoholic beverages are documented in the 16th century, long before the invention of the car or the appearance of electric lighting. These original cocktails were very simple, as they were a mixture of “water, sugar, distillates and herbal or aromatic ingredients”. This combination of drink and vegetable ingredients was originally called “cocktail”. 

In this sense, cocktails were famous, especially in the United States, where they soon became part of popular culture. In the 18th century, Charles Dickens himself wrote in one of his famous novels that one of his characters, Major Hawkins, was “a man capable of ingesting more cocktails than any other known gentleman”. 

In the mid-1800s, around 1860, the cocktail bar, which had been in decline for some time, is recovered by the great American bars and hotels, where a Bourbon cocktail is prepared, which people begin to order as “one of a lifetime”, that is to say, an “Old Fashioned Bourbon”, which gives rise to the name by which one of the best-known whiskey cocktails in the world is known today.

Since then, bartenders have reimagined over and over again what whiskey is blended with, yet the Old Fashioned remains one of the most beloved blends by lovers of bourbon and fine whiskey. It is a very simple recipe and, at the same time, one of the most masculine cocktails that can be found. In this sense, characters like Don Draper from Mad Men used to drink this cocktail in the series. 

To prepare the Old Fashioned cocktail, place a sugar cube in a whiskey glass and drop two or three dashes of angostura over it, the angostura should wet the lump but not break it. Next, add water to the fresh water and, with a masher, grind the sugar, mixing everything until it becomes a kind of reddish syrup.

Next, add about three ice cubes to the mixture and the 30 ml of bourbon, do not do it all at once, but in two stages, so that the liquor is well diluted with the previous mixture. To finish this whiskey cocktail, stir everything well with a mixing spoon, add the orange peel, without forgetting to give it a “twist”, that is, twist it before introducing it, so that the citrus oils are activated and the citrus oils are released. aromas.

Stir everything once more and add the Maraschino cherry to improve the final presentation and make it as similar as possible to the original. Contrary to orange peel, cherry does not give flavor or smell, it only adds a touch of color.