If you want to get really good at making drinks, it’s important to develop a deep knowledge of your raw materials. Often, what distinguishes the best Martini you’ve ever had from an average Martini is that the bartender knew to pair the characteristics of a particular gin with the characteristics of a particular vermouth. Many of the classic tiki drinks created by Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic were only slight variations on a few basic formulas, differing primarily in the types of rum used. And in today’s cocktail world it’s often the recognition of a counterintuitive similarity between two disparate spirits that leads bartenders to create new variations on time honored drinks by substituting their base spirits. If you know your spirits inside and out, the world of cocktails is open to you.
Unfortunately, distilled spirits can be difficult to get to know on their own terms. Most are far too strong to drink neat and taste much other than burn. As we’ve seen previously, dilution can help make a fiery spirit manageable and release its natural aromatics, but dilution alone can also make a once vital dram feel a touch limp. What the would-be aficionado needs is a way to soften the edges of an unruly spirit so that its nuances can be appreciated without robbing it of its personality and zing.
Enter the Old Fashioned: so named because it is essentially the original cocktail—the no-frills combination of liquor, sugar, bitters, and water that 19th century Americans would have had in mind when they ordered a capital-c Cocktail (and which old timers eventually found themselves having to ask for by a more specific name as bartenders became more fanciful with their concoctions). A well-made Old Fashioned is, as I’ve heard the Brooklyn bartender and writer St. John Frizzell say, the drink equivalent of taking a nice cut of steak and seasoning it with a bit of salt and pepper. It keeps the spirit front and center, but makes it more palatable by simultaneously toning it down and enlivening it.
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