The Old Fashioned,
a history and how we build ours.

The word "cocktail" appears in print for the first time in 1806, in a Hudson, New York paper called The Balance and Columbian Repository. The definition is short: spirits, sugar, water, and bitters. That is the Old Fashioned, more or less.

Jerry Thomas published the first American bartender's manual in 1862 and called the formula a Whiskey Cocktail. By the 1880s, bartenders had started improving cocktails with liqueurs, syrups, and garnishes that obscured the spirit. Drinkers who wanted the original began asking for theirs the old-fashioned way. The Pendennis Club in Louisville is the address most often cited for the named drink, around 1881, in honor of Colonel James E. Pepper. The story is contested. The phrasing stuck.

Cocktail №001 in our own ledger is the Old Fashioned, the long way. It opened the menu in 2015 and has not left it.

A sugar cube, muddled with bitters and a small splash of water, gives you a drink with texture. You can feel the undissolved grain at the bottom of the glass. Some people like that. Some don't.

Simple syrup makes a smoother drink, but the sweetness reads as flat, more sugar-water than caramel.

Demerara syrup, made with raw demerara sugar and water, has a mineral, almost burnt-sugar character. It is one way to build the drink. The current West End menu lists brown sugar syrup in the house Old Fashioned.

The point is not sugar for sugar's sake. The sweetener rounds the whiskey without taking over the finished glass.

Angostura is the working bitter of the Old Fashioned. It has been in print on cocktail menus longer than the cocktail has had its name. Spice, clove, gentian, bittering bark. A few dashes pull every other ingredient into focus.

The current printed menu names Angostura bitters in the house Old Fashioned. If another bitter is in the glass, the answer can vary by the whiskey and the night. Ask Dustin.

What we do not do is hide the bitters under the sugar. The drink should taste like the bitters are doing work.

The first written Old Fashioneds were made with American rye, because rye was the dominant American whiskey through the 19th century. Bourbon overtook rye in the 20th century and became the default base for the drink.

Bourbon, by federal definition, is at least 51% corn, aged in new charred oak barrels. It runs softer, sweeter, rounder. The corn pulls toward caramel and vanilla. Most Old Fashioneds at most bars are bourbon Old Fashioneds.

Rye, at least 51% rye grain, runs drier, spicier, more peppery. A rye Old Fashioned is sharper at the edges. If you grew up on bourbon Old Fashioneds and have never tried a rye one, the contrast is worth trying.

The current printed house build is rye. Bourbon remains the softer traditional direction. Ask at the bar before assuming a spirit substitution or its price.

A double Old Fashioned glass, heavy-bottomed. One large cube of ice, slow-melting, cut or molded so it sits just below the rim. A slow stir, around thirty seconds, to chill and dilute in the same motion. An orange peel, expressed over the surface so the oils sheen the top of the drink, then dropped in.

No cherry by default. We will add one if you want, but the brandied cherry that takes over the bottom of the glass at most bars is a 20th-century addition that crowds the drink.

The garnish is the orange peel. The flavor is in the oil, not in the fruit.

The house variant of the Old Fashioned at West End Elixir Co. is built on bacon-fat-washed bourbon. Fat-washing is a technique that suspends rendered fat in the spirit, lets it infuse for a stretch of hours, then freezes the bottle so the fat solidifies and lifts out clean. What stays behind is the aromatic compounds that make bacon smell like bacon: smoke, salt, savor, the long-grain caramel of the rendered fat. The bourbon comes out heavier on the nose, savory on the palate, still bourbon.

The bacon variation uses fat-washed bourbon and follows its own house spec. It is not listed or priced on the current supplied menu, so ask at the bar about availability and the night's build.

A field guide to the fat-washing technique itself lives here: how we render the fat, why bacon, and the build sheet. The short version is, ask for it at the bar.