welcome friends welcome back to
cocktails after dark today we're going
to do an old
fashioned um a cocktail that is often
held up as sort of the pinnacle or one
of the cornerstones of cocktail culture
some people
have even put forward the hypothesis
that there are only six
cocktails and all other cocktails are a
derivative of one of those six and the
first among these is the old-fashioned
now the first instance of a cocktail
called the old fashioned that i can find
is from 1888 written by theodore poole
and what's interesting about that
old-fashioned cocktail is that it's
essentially a take on
the cocktail in this book from 1887
written by jerry thomas
and his cocktail is called the whiskey
cocktail and the story goes that the
whiskey cocktail had been around for a
long time and it started to get stepped
on and things were added to it and in
fact in this cocktail book a page
earlier there's a new and improved
whiskey cocktail which adds a whole
bunch of things and so people would come
into the saloon and say i want a whiskey
cocktail made in the old fashioned way
which just got shortened to
old-fashioned
and as i go through all of these
cocktail books um from the 1800s 1900s
on into the 1960s there are
dozens of different old-fashioned
recipes that you see the recipe expand
and contract and expand and contract and
what we have now in this sort of new
cocktail culture
the new craft cocktail culture
is a complete return to
this recipe from 1887 and in fact in
in the latest cocktail book that i
bought from death and company
their old fashioned recipe is exactly
this old-fashioned recipe from jerry
thomas
so i find that very interesting that
it's expanded and contracted and
expanded and contracted at its core it
is spirit
sugar bitters
and water the water is there mostly
in order to dissolve the sugar but we'll
get to that in a moment so
at its core this is a whiskey forward
cocktail all of the other ingredients
are there to support and bring forward
the flavors in the whiskey so today i'm
going to do it with two different
whiskies
i've got probably 24 different whiskeys
over there in the cupboard i grabbed two
at random
to kind of give me different flavor
profiles this is an american bourbon and
the one that i'm about to pour here
is a canadian rye whiskey 100 rye
whiskey
and i really like the flavor of this one
so i'm kind of interested to see
how these two different spirits from the
same family taste different in the end
now we'll come to the sugar
in jerry thomas's recipe he calls for
gum syrup
in some of these later recipes they go
back to a sugar cube and the problem
with the sugar cube is that you cannot
fully dissolve sugar in alcohol which is
where the water comes in
and a lot of the
a lot of the recipes tell you to serve
it with a spoon so when you give it to
your customer or your guest you put a
spoon in the glass
and the whole idea with that is because
the sugar cube never dissolves
you want your guests to continually stir
it with the ice so that as the ice melts
you get a little bit of water the sugar
dissolves more so you don't get sweet at
the beginning you get the sweet at the
end after your
cocktail
is diluted quite a bit
so i'm gonna go back to what jerry did
and put in gum syrup it's two part sugar
one part water and gum arabic mixed in
and also the sugar cube brings a bit of
theater to the whole thing you know you
put the sugar cube in and you dash on
the bitters and you wait for it to soak
in and then you smash it up
i don't need theater i want great taste
in the glass so i want my sugar to be
dissolved i'm using the gum syrup
next we come to the bitters
now
jerry thomas asks for bokers bitters
booker's bitters aren't available
anymore they stopped making them in
1920. this boker's bitters that i'm
holding in my hand is a reproduction
based on the best knowledge of what
people have of what's in it
and when you smell it on the nose you
get orange
and
it is known for sure that bokers bitters
had bitter orange peel in it
and so when jerry thomas is asking for
bokers bitters that's where that orange
component starts to come in
most later recipes ask for angustura or
like bitters so i'm going to put in two
dashes of angostura into each glass
then
i'm going to put in one orange bitter
into each glass to bring in that orange
maybe two they're small dashes to bring
in that orange flavor
and so when you get into later
cocktail books into
the 1920s and 1930s
you see
fashions made with curacao
and that's bringing that bitter orange
flavor into it that's where that that
orange starts to come in again and then
you get into the 1940s and 1950s you
start to see old fashions with an orange
piece put in and muddled in
or
in the case of a lot of cocktails a
piece of orange peel as a garnish to
bring that orange flavor in because it's
missing from the bitters
now i've built these cocktails in a
mixing glass
in jerry thomas's day he was
building it in a shaker and shaking it
with ice
and then pouring it into a glass
sort of mid-century
it's a build in the glass over an ice
cube type drink and then we see people
going back to doing it in a stirring
glass
in today's world
i don't really like building in a glass
i find that when you build it in a glass
you can't really stir it well enough so
i'd like this method of making the
cocktail and so i've got two
chilled lowball glasses
and two giant clear ice cubes
and there we go hey glenn hey guys
so
the old fashioned wait i still have to
do the garnish
so the garnish is
lemon
minimalistic flair yes very minimalistic
flair
i'm not much on flair
it should be in the glass not left
behind the counter now
i am going to put
an orange peel in as well
okay
well
tactics vary a lot of people say you
shouldn't squeeze the lemon peel or put
the lemon around because it's too
fragrant
other people say
the orange and the lemon should be a
background player and just put in
there's so many variations on this
cocktail i think what i really want to
get across to you is there's so many
variations on this cocktail there is no
one way to make it although you can make
it every way and just keep trying and
just keep trying when you like and the
variation really comes in in the spirit
you want to elevate the spirit that
you're using the whiskey that you're
using and i have to imagine that has the
greatest influence on that that is the
greatest yeah and so as you play with
the bitters in the amount of sugar
you're going to find that sweet spot for
that whiskey
right i'm just checking to see if he's
done talking so we can taste it let's
taste it okay so you've got the 1492
that's the
1792 1492 is a completely different
thing it's a different year 1792 that's
an american bourbon and this is dylan's
rye that's pretty good
interesting
it's tough work
it is hard someone's got to do it
what do you think
i think if i was choosing a preference
yep i'd choose this one sorry
i would choose the rye
but wait there's more
okay
with that being said grab the stir spoon
and give it a stir
there's a square cube in there well yeah
and there you go so i might just give it
a little shush
because i can't really stir anything
building it in the glass can be a bit of
a
okay i feel like it's it's
redistribution
hmm
okay so i put in too much
that changed the mouth feel completely
so that's that's salt i was gonna say
and it made it taste salty yes i was
gonna add that why does it taste salty
because i thought it was you know that's
a that's a that's a two to one
salt to water
ratio and i put in too much i know that
i put in too much but i actually like
how it changed the flavor it brings all
the flavors together and i think that's
one of the things that in in cocktail
making a lot of people don't talk about
and it certainly doesn't get any play in
any of the historical textbooks so where
did it come from
like how did it get into your brain as
well in the current cocktail culture i
have met a couple of people who put in a
little bit of salt and that comes from
our current understanding of what salt
does to enhance flavors
and i think it has a place in the bar
you have to play with it and figure out
what that line is between enhancing and
becoming something that you actually
taste mm-hmm
which actually surprised her changed the
texture too though it does change the
texture it makes it
creamy creamier yeah and i think that's
the word it doesn't taste like cream but
it makes it that mouth feel of creamier
so there you have
the old-fashioned the new old-fashioned
the whiskey cocktail
the corn
the cornerstone of cocktail making
that's the best part is it just keeps
circles around circulating circles
around and i'm sure that you can never
get bored well no and so i've i've just
taken the old-fashioned
by adding the salt and
shifted it over a little bit to
something where someone eventually will
come back and go no take the salt out
does that mean you get to rename it
um what should we name our new cocktail
the old fashioned let's stick with the
old fashioned thanks for stopping by see
you again soon
so i wanted to shoot an addendum to the
old-fashioned uh recipe video
because i know that this is going to
come up in the comments section and i i
thought i'd you know touch on it and
then you can have a discussion
this is a cocktail book called the old
waldorf bar days published in 1931
by people who worked at the bar at the
waldorf astoria hotel in new york city
and this book seems to be
the genesis of of a bit of cocktail
mythology
and i'll read it
the old-fashioned whiskey and this is on
page 153
this was brought to the old waldorf in
the days of its sit-down bar and
introduced by or in honor of colonel
james e pepper of kentucky proprietor of
a celebrated whiskey of the period the
old-fashioned whiskey cocktail was said
to have been the invention of a
bartender at the famous pandenis club in
louisville of which colonel pepper was a
member
this is sort of the first mention 1931
mentioned of this story
and a lot of cocktail people mythology
people have have tried to work the dates
backwards to make it real
the problem with this story is
that
james e pepper
didn't become a member of the pendennis
club until
i don't know
1893.
by 1893 we already have written
documented proof and history of this
cocktail
called the old fashioned um called the
whiskey cocktail called the
old-fashioned whiskey cocktail called
the old fashioned it's already out there
it's already published
long before pen the pandenis club
accepts pepper as a member
and then there are a whole bunch of
sort of concurrent stories that try to
build on this
that list off bartenders who worked at
the penn dennis club who would have
created this old-fashioned cocktail or
called it the old-fashioned cocktail
first
but again all of those bartenders
don't start working at the pendennis
club
until well after
both the old fashioned is already
published
and pepper
becomes a member so you're looking at
people who started working there as a
bartender in 1898 and later
so generally cocktail historians say
that this story is
that's a nice story
but it's not necessarily true the
old-fashioned already existed wasn't
created at the penn dennis club
but it looks really good on their
website