The Old Fashioned, and How to Make It

The Old Fashioned has come a long way in the past ten years. Until recently it was routinely manhandled by bartenders, with the requisite whiskey, water, sugar and bitters forced to cohabitate with muddled fruit and soda. Today, mixologists and cocktail historians have seen to it that the drink's austere, simple, original form has returned to the fore. But apparently the good work has not gone far enough for cocktailian layman nonpareil Martin Doudoroff. And so he came up with Old Fashioned 101, a doctrinaire one-page on-line primer on how to do the cocktail right. I must say I agree with him on almost every point. (Making ice "optional" is too hard core purist for even me.)

Here is my Times piece on the site. I hope it drove many viewers to the page.

Cocktail-Glass Aging, or, Turning White Dog Tan

I recently met a bootleg distiller from upstate New York. We'll call him Laird. He's been making his own booze for about 30 years, and his knowledge of the craft is vast. I happened to have in my possession a few of the new white dogs that are on the market. I was curious what he thought of them, being a maker of white lightening himself, so I let him sample a couple.

After noting the presence of a paraffin flavor in making of the craft distillers making white dog out there, and generally disparaging the kind of cheap, Dutch stills he was sure each maker was using, he led me through an interesting science experiment. A friend of Laird's and mine—at whose home we met—is an amateur winemaker. He had some French wood chips on hand. Laird suggested I put a few of these in a glass of the Buffalo Trace White Dog (which has an alcohol content of 62.5%) and watch what happened. I was astounded. The whiskey started to take on the wood immediately. Within a minute, it was darker and tasted markedly different. In five minutes, it began to taste vaguely like aged whiskey. I had no idea such things could occur so quickly. "It only works with French oak," said Laird. "The French stuff is great for that. With American oak, it's a slower process." (Here's a photo of the whiskey in question, below.)

And that was that. Until I visited that same friend this weekend. He had an idea—wouldn't it be kinda cool to do the wood-chip thing, but in the context of a cocktail? Light bulb! It would indeed.

My friend gave me a small stash of French wood chips. I went home and prepared myself a white dog Old Fashioned, using Death's Door white whiskey. (Death's Door seems to be the white dog that works best in most standard cocktails.) I muddled a sugar cube with some Angostura, then threw the wood cube in there and stirred it around some more. I added the whiskey, stirred; ice, stirred.

A Visit to The Chambers Hotel

Ma Peche, the new Midtown location of the Momofuku empire, which is situated in The Chamber Hotel, a swanky habitat on an otherwise downscale block, has started serving lunch, I hear. But that's not what brought me to E. 56th Street on a recent evening. It was to try mixologist Don Lee's new cocktails.

Don Lee, formerly of PDT, is Momofuku chef David Chang's drink man, and goes where Chang goes, Lee follows. That includes Ma Peche. The mezzanine has been serving drinks since late last year, including three original Lee creations: a 7 Spice Sour, a Pikesville Mule and a Sesame Old Fashioned.

The Chambers has that kind of sleek, cold, ultra-modern look that you find in a lot of boutique Manhattan hotels. Not my style, but there it is. One takes an elevator to the mezzanine, where there are an arrangement of precious chairs, tables and couches, and gigantic coffee table art books. There's no bar. You have to take a seat and be served by a waiter to get a drink, which makes everything a lot more formal than I'd like.

I'm a great fan of the drinks Lee devised for the Momofuku Ssam Bar in the East Village, particularly the Celery & Nori. He has a way with eastern flavors and ingredients that leads to unique libation. So I was excited to try the Ma Peche creations. I didn't opt for the Sesame Old Fashioned, mainly because I knew that I'd like it, if that makes sense. I wanted to try the drinks I wasn't sure of.

I started with the 7 Spice Sour, which was a winner. Its base is a togarashi-infused momofuku "private label" honjozo. Added are yuzu/lime juice and simple syrup. As I understand it, togarashi is a common Japanese spice mixture made of—yes—seven ingredients: chili pepper; madarin orange peel; sesame seed; poppy seed; hemp seed; nori; and ground sansho. I do not know for sure if this is the mixture that Lee used. The drink had a nice bite to it, owning to those spices, which plays well with the sourness of the citrus.

I then moved on to the Pikesville Mule, which, I'm sorry to say, did not come off well. The cocktail is made of Rittenhouse rye, lemon juice, ginger syrup and Peychaud’s bitters—apparently an unhappy marriage of ingredients. There was too much lemon in the mix, making the drink too sour, and the ginger syrup was more spicy than sweet. Plus, Peychaud's seemed to be the wrong bitters for this mix. The aftertaste was acrid and bitter. Perhaps I should have gone with the Old-Fashioned after all, which includes toasted sesame infused Hennessy VSOP, caramelized simple syrup and Angostura bitters. Ah well. A reason to return.

The Sipping News

Chartreuse takes advantage of its current popularity, hoisting up the price. [Alcademics]

The Alcohol Beverage Control in California suddenly decides to let San Francisco bars that all infusions are actually illegal. [San Francisco Chronicle]

Prepare to have your head removed from your shoulders if you mention a Vodka Old-Fashioned in some circles. [eGullet]

Chilean wine industry suffers following earthquake, with tanks busted, barrels broken and buildings collapsed. [Dr. Vino]

Beam releases Old Crow Reserve, an extension of a very old brand. [Cowdery]

The Aughts in Cocktails

Confronted regularly with so many new cocktail creations, as I have been over the past few years, I've often fell to musing, "Which of these libations are for the ages?" It's easy enough to decide if something is a good-tasting cocktail or not; that can be ascertained on the spot. But that doesn't necessarily equal staying power. Are we currently sipping, unknowingly, what will be considered by future generations to be our Martini, our Manhattan, our great contribution to the bar?

I had the opportunity to dwell on this matter in a very public way recently, writing a list of lasting libations for the Dec. 30 edition of the New York Times. Some of the entries—Audrey Saunders' Gin-Gin Mule, Don Lee's Benton's Old Fashioned, Phil Ward's Oaxaca Old Fashioned—were easy choices. I had long regarded them as modern classics which will have their place in coming histories of 21st-century drinking, not only because they are great drink in and of themselves, but because the embodied and/or kicked off significant mixology trends. Others I had originally thought to included—Salvatore Calabrese's Breakfast Martini and Julio Barmejo's Tommy's Margarita—I was forced to nix when I discovered from their authors that they were, in fact, created in the '90s, not the '00s. To back up my conclusions, I consulted with a couple dozen cocktails authorities on the East and West Coasts, as well as London.

Here's the article:

A Decade of Invention, and Reinvention

By ROBERT SIMONSON

WHEN you hoist a leg over a barstool these days, you’re as likely to find Tom Edison as a Tom Collins. Light bulbs have been popping up behind the bar, with more cocktails developed in the last 10 years than probably any decade since Prohibition. Some of them have emerged as modern classics, standing out not only as culinary creations, but also as signposts of the decade’s most significant mixology trends.

GIN-GIN MULE This Audrey Saunders invention is often the first thing that cocktail pros mention when asked about new classics. “Bartenders all over the world tend to know the Gin-Gin Mule,” said Gary Regan, author of several cocktail books, including the recent “Bartender’s Gin Compendium.” Ms. Saunders — a leading light in darkened bars — created it before founding her SoHo bar, Pegu Club. Essentially a gin-based version of the ginger-minty Moscow Mule — one of the few vodka cocktails still granted respect by the avant-garde — the drink was a symbol both of the cocktail crowd’s enthusiastic reclamation of gin and its curled-lip repudiation of vodka. (Gin is also the base of Ms. Sauders’s Earl Grey MarTEAni, an early and influential example of the tea-infusion trend.) By decade’s end, the Gin-Gin Mule could be found on cocktail menus across the country — as could gin.

BENTON’S OLD-FASHIONED Don Lee, formerly of PDT in the East Village, credits Eben Freeman, the mad-scientist mixologist of the recently demised Tailor, with opening his eyes to “fat washing” liquor. But it was this instantly cultish concoction, which infuses bourbon with Allan Benton’s Tennessee bacon, that revved up interest in that technique, which melds flesh and firewater. Created by Mr. Lee in 2007 at PDT, it perhaps best epitomizes the advent of savory cocktails, which draw herbs, spices and vegetables, including chilies, into the world within the glass.

OAXACA OLD-FASHIONED Tequila didn’t play much of a role in the early years of the cocktail renaissance. And mezcal, tequila’s rough-hewn relation, had none at all. Both are used instead of bourbon or rye in this south-of-the-border twist on the Old-Fashioned, with terroir-specific agave syrup instead of sugar. Invented in 2007 by the tequila specialist Philip Ward at Death & Co. in the East Village, this drink quickly appeared on menus across the country and became a harbinger of the Mexican spirits’ ascendancy. It’s now just one of many tequila- and mezcal-based drinks at Mr. Ward’s bar Mayahuel.

RED HOOK COCKTAIL Rye whiskey roared back in the last decade after decades in eclipse. With it came new homages to pre-Prohibition rye-based cocktails like the Manhattan and the Brooklyn. This mix of rye, sweet vermouth and maraschino liqueur, created by the former Milk & Honey bartender Enzo Errico, inspired at least a dozen more sub-riffs by other ardent cocktail classicists, with almost all the drinks named after Brooklyn neighborhoods, including the Greenpoint (which uses Chartreuse), the Cobble Hill (Amaro Montenegro and cucumber slices) and the Bensonhurst (maraschino liqueur and Cynar). New spins on the Old-Fashioned (see above) were nearly as common.

ST-GERMAIN COCKTAIL If you didn’t notice that, starting in 2007, St-Germain was in about half of the new drinks you were cradling, you just weren’t paying attention. The elderflower-based elixir with the sui generis floral flavor almost single-handedly invigorated the moribund liqueur category. Suddenly semi-forgotten potions like Drambuie, Cherry Heering and Chartreuse (the current mixer of the moment) were being dusted off and tarted up. And every new liqueur wanted to be as big as St-Germain when it grew up. A list of new St-Germain cocktails could fill a few columns, but the mix of the liqueur, Champagne and sparkling water known as the St-Germain cocktail was perhaps the most common, mixed by high-end watering holes like Bourbon & Branch in San Francisco and the Zig Zag Café in Seattle. Unusually, the recipe came not from a bartender’s brain, but the company’s marketing department. “It doesn’t happen that often that a drink that comes from a manufacturer gets so well received,” said Ann R. Tuennerman, founder of the Tales of the Cocktail convention in New Orleans.

ABSINTHE DRIP When a liquor that has been unavailable for nine decades hits the shelves again, it creates a stir. For many cocktail mavens, absinthe, the Victorians’ embalmer of choice, was the missing piece to so many liquid puzzles. Bottles began reappearing on our shores in 2007, after it was realized that a nearly century-old ban had actually been overturned decades ago. By the end of the Bush administration, absinthe was even being made in America, like St. George from California and Trillium from Oregon. Soon, it was not unusual to find an absinthe water drip at the end of the bar, slowly clouding a glass of the green liquid with dissolved sugar, the classic way to drink absinthe. It would only be old hat if you happened to be Degas.

BARTENDER’S CHOICE Ten years ago, the suggestion that a barkeep name your poison would have been greeted with a withering fisheye. But “Bartender’s Choice” is an option seen on cocktail menus from the Varnish in Los Angeles to the Violet Hour in Chicago to any of Sasha Petraske’s joints in New York. Bartenders nationwide have raised their level of skill and scholarship. Customers have followed them with an increased sense of adventure and a willingness to swallow whatever they dish up.

Review: Malted Wheat White Whiskey

I figure that headline is enough to get you to read this item.

Wheat whiskey we know. White whiskey is a growing market. But malted wheat white whiskey?

This product, surely unique (for now) in the liquor market, comes from Death's Door, the Wisconsin micro-distillery that already produces a vodka and a gin, and, for my money, it's the best thing they've done.

I encountered it at Bar Celona, the new Spanish-influence cocktail and tapas bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Tad Carducci of Tippling Brothers is in charge of the cocktail program. I had had a couple drinks, and was about to clear out when a colleague recommended I try the Albino Old-Fashioned. Well, "Old Fashioned" are two words (one word?) that always catch my ear. So I stayed and had another. Am I glad I did. It was one of the most original and delicious spins on the old drink I had ever had. It was composed of white whiskey, sugar, bitters, brandied cherries and grapefruit peel, and was as mellow and smooth as a southern California day.

I asked what whiskey was being used and the bartender showed me what appear to a clear bottle, the kind waiters plunk down in trendy bistros as your water decanter. Looking more closely, there were a few words on it, near the bottom, in black. "Death's Door Whiskey." Then, in smaller letters "Made with wheat from Washington Island, Door Country, Wisconsin." To me, the simple bottle is one of the great design triumphs in modern liquor packaging.

My colleague and I thought that this might be the first appearance of the product in a New York bar, but we weren't sure.

Death's Door rolled out the whiskey last year. It's not just another moonshine jumping on the bandwagon. It's an unusual un-aged combination of 20% malted barley and 80% organic hard red winter, all grown grown in Washington Island, which lies in Lake Michigan just off the Door County peninsula in Wisconsin. It sits in stainless steel barrels for three weeks and then oak barrels for 3 days, at which point it’s bottled.

The result has a beguilingly fruity nose of melon, a few vague tropical traces and baked sweet breads. (Not sweetbreads, but sweet breads.) It's strongly flavored, but mellow, as I saw, and soft, with muskmelon, golden raisins, baking spices, apple, maybe some white pepper. It's not hugely deep, but it's hugely appealing. And it has a long finish, a nice companion on a cold night.

I made a Old Fashioned for myself at home using the stuff. It wasn't as good as the one at Bar Celona (I didn't follow their exact specifications), but it was damn good.

While were on the subject of Death's Door, the company has wisely listened to their marketing people and debuted some new bottles. It miles beyond the old, dull, high-shoulder wine bottle with a simple map of Washington Island on the label. Death Door's Brian Ellison tells me I'm the first to see the new bottle, even before the new distributors. Which means you, readers, are the first enthusiasts to eyeball it on the Internet.

A Visit to the Breslin Bar

Sizzling hot new scenes usually make me ill. The inevitable hoard of trendy, 20-something nocturnal bar rats; the deafening soup of chatter and too-loud music; and the inattentive, sloppy service born of of-the-moment hubris. Still, I try to enter every new bar with an open mind. And so I did with the Breslin Bar, the au courant drinking den inside Murray Hill's Ace Hotel, which will soon be joined by a sure-to-be-beloved April Bloomfield (The Spotted Pig) restaurant.


It's big, to begin with. High ceilings, bisected by pillars. There's the by-now requisite taxidermy. (Thank you, Freeman's and PDT.) There was a DJ spinning tunes off his laptop. (Is it me, or can anybody be this kind of DJ?) Lots of couches, a big long farmer's table in the center. Wood paneling, bookcases, a huge American flag on the back wall. And a small corner bar in the back corner servicing the enormous space; it easily needs to be twice as big to do the job.

I took up a stool at the bar and perused the drink menu. I had plenty of time to do this. It was easily 10 minutes before anyone at the bar made eye contact with me, let alone take my order, even though I was barely two feet away from the bartenders. They weren't unoccupied. They were constantly distracted by questions from kitchen staff and waitstaff. Table orders were clearly taking precedent over bar orders. Still, a man next to me, who waited as long as I did to order, told me he came up to the bar because his party had been sitting for 20 minutes on the floor without seeing a waiter.

It was decent drink list. Good selections in every liquor category, aperitif and digestif sections, limited but decent wines, including a Friuli rose from Bastianich. The cocktails were five in number and not particularly inspiring. Hound on Fire is just vodka with some grapefruit juice and chili salt. The Starling, with St. Germain, Lillet White and orange peel, seemed a little light weight and two-dimensional.

Since they were bold enough to name their Old Fashioned after the Ace hotel, I asked for one, thinking they were proud of it. The drink substitutes reposado tequila for the whiskey and agave nectar for the sugar, plus orange bitters and brandied cherries (one muddled and one as garnish). It was a good, satisfying drink, smooth and potent. And I would have been fairly impressed with it if it weren't a nearly complete rip-off of Phil Ward's Oaxaca Old Fashioned, long available at Death & Co.

Mad Men and Drinking, Season Three, Part II: Don Draper Makes an Old Fashioned

Perhaps the most cocktail-centric moment in the entire history of the AMC series "Mad Men" comes in "My Old Kentucky Home," the third episode of the third season. That lead character Don Draper likes Old Fashioneds, we know. In a central scene in this episode, we actually get to see him make one.

Trapped at a country club event thrown by his boss, Roger Sterling (mint juleps are served—it's a Kentucky Derby theme), Draper escapes to the club's bar room in search of liquid relief more to his liking. There he hops behind the bar and has at the bottles and equipment like a pro. Or, at least, like a man who knows what he wants.

First he grabs two rocks glasses and plops a good-sized sugar cube in each. He then takes out the Old Overholt—the first time this rye brand has been featured on the show. He soaks the cubes with a good amount of bitters (Angostura, I assume, though the bottle he used was unmarked and didn't have Angostura's distinctive oversized label). That done, he takes a large mixing glass, fills it with ice to chill. Draper pours in about four ounces of rye and tops that with soda water. He then muddles away at the two glasses, which now contain a cherry. (He is not seen putting those in.) He gives the bar glass mixture a quick stir with a bar spoon, and then pours the contents, ice and all, in even amounts into the rocks glasses, and drops an orange slice on top of each drink. When he hands one of the cocktails to his only companion in the room, a southerner named Connie (who may or may not be Conrad Hilton).

Not the most graceful way to make an Old Fashioned. All that unneeded soda, no jiggering, too much bitters and the sloppy transfer of the whisky and ice into the glasses. But probably an accurate example for the time, considering it's a depiction of a regular 1960s guy making himself a drink in the way he's become accustomed to it. Anyway, Connie called it "a hell of a cocktail."

Otherwise, the episode saw various members of "creative" at Sterling Cooper trying to hatch ideas for a Bacardi campaign called "Bacardi Beach."

In episode five, "The Fog," Don, while waiting for Betty to give birth to their third child, shares a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label with an expectant father prison guard in the "solarium" at the hospital. The Walker label and bottle hasn't changed much over the years. Later, Peggy Olson has a Bloody Mary at lunch with Herman "Duck" Philips, a Draper antagonist from season two who makes a reappearance.