Drink of the Day: The Old-Fashioned, considered in an old-fashioned way

The Old-Fashioned was one of the first drinks I did for the original Drink of the Day -- now more than two years ago. I long wanted to return to it and try it much more in-depth. That required a lot of drinking...um, research, which took a while. But here we go.

The Old-Fashioned, as directed by the Playboy Bartending Guide that has been my drinking bible, consists of bitters, sugar, water and blended whiskey. I've since come to learn that it really should be a bourbon drink, and the ways of making it vary, though bitters, a sweetener and whiskey are pretty much guaranteed. So, I thought, what if I try every variation of whiskey and bitters that I have? It's exhaustive, but that's old-school, so I figured, what the hell. I had a basic recipe of 2 ounces of liquor, 1 teaspoon of water, half a teaspoon of sweetener and a dash of bitters, topped with a lemon twist.

I started with bourbon, since I hadn't made a true Old-Fashioned in the original post. The classic variation was with sugar and Angostura bitters. The bite of the bourbon (I used Maker's Mark pretty much throughout) clearly dominated, although the bitters were expressed well, too. It's a drink not for the faint of heart or anyone who doesn't actually like to taste alcohol. I gave it 4 glasses, though I wondered: Might it have been better had it been a little sweeter? So before I moved on to the next type of bitters, I switched from sugar to agave nectar, figuring that's a purer sweetness and a little easier to mix, too. That did the trick -- it's still a 4-glass rating, but having just a touch more sweetness was preferable. So I decided to stick with agave nectar through all the whiskey variations.

On, then, to other bitters. My sense is that although there is a plethora of bitters on the market, the three most common are Angostura, Peychaud's and orange bitters. So I went with those three with each type of whiskey. Peychaud's is a classic cocktail ingredient, but the flavor is somewhat medicinal, and with the bourbon Old-Fashioned, that was only highlighted. I don't mind a drink that tastes like a drink, but when it tastes like cough syrup, no thanks -- that's 2.5 glasses. Things improved dramatically with the orange bitters, though. The citrus and the bourbon really complement each other. This ran the score up to 4.5 glasses.

From there, it was on to Canadian Club, and the outcome was just as I expected -- an average whiskey made for an average Old-Fashioned. With Angostura, we get a less harsh flavor than the bourbon drink, but the cocktail loses some of its character. 3.5 glasses. The CC actually worked better with the Peychaud's than the bourbon did, yielding a more subtle flavor that took the edge off of the medicinal nature of the bitters. 3.5 glasses. And finally, the CC just couldn't stand up enough to the orange bitters, so that one was 3 glasses.

Next up was rye, a spirit I don't have a lot of experience with. (Well, I do now.) I had a good version, albeit with a stupid product name: (ri)1. The changes were evident in each version. Like the bourbon, the rye was a very stout, strong flavor, but it had a spiciness that the bourbon lacked. With Angostura, there was nothing much to notice -- a solid drink, but nothing special. 3 glasses. With the Peychaud's, though, the mix of spiciness and flavor in the Peychaud's was exceptional -- perhaps there's some connection with the old New Orleans nature of the Peychaud's and the fact that rye is a key ingredient in the old New Orleans cocktail the Sazerac. Or maybe I'm totally making that up. Either way, the combination gets 4 glasses. And finally, with the orange, another average but quite acceptable cocktail, in which the orange flavor is a bit more muted than in the two earlier Old-Fashioneds with these bitters. 3 glasses.

On to Seagram's 7 Crown, a whiskey so unremarkable that I seriously considered skipping it. But if you're going to be thorough, be thorough. The Angostura version, was nothing special. The whiskey was pretty submissive, so the bitter and sweet came together as you would expect. It scored 3.5 glasses. Then came the biggest surprise of this experiment: With Peychaud's, I scored perhaps my favorite batch of the whole group. It was smooth and just slightly sweet, with the essence from the lemon peel really adding a nice note. I rated this 4.5 glasses. More on that in a minute. The orange bitters version was absolutely average: 3 glasses.

Next up came Scotch. I was prepared to be blown away by a Scotch Old-Fashioned, given my love of Scotch. But it was actually quite the opposite. In each case, the oakiness of the Scotch, so wonderful on its own, didn't mix well with the bitters and the sweet. Angostura was 2.5 glasses; Peychaud's came out a little too sweet, with a 3-glass score; and the orange bitters version offered nothing -- also 3 glasses.

With all of that done, I took a bit of a break from Old-Fashioneds, returning a month or so later to try a version made with a completely different technique, picked up from this recipe in The New York Times. I was intrigued by using muddled fruit, something like a mojito. I decided not to be quite so exhaustive about this one -- or, frankly, this post would never have been written. So I stuck with bourbon, started with the base recipe (though with regular sugar; who the hell could find Demerara, whatever that was) and tweaked it a few times for varying results. The basic version, made with Elijah Craig bourbon, was a good building block. It produces a drink that is smooth and slightly sweet, with a good hint of whiskey burn, but not enough to be unpleasant. It gets 4 glasses.

Feeling adventurous, I switched to half a clementine, one of those tiny, super-sweet oranges. I thought for sure the resulting drink would be overpoweringly sweet, but if anything, it wasn't sweet. With such a large portion of bitters, the little fruit couldn't hold up, even with some ferocious mixing. The result was 2.5 glasses. Things got much better when I sliced up the clementine to get it to muddle better, and switched over to agave nectar. Now, the drink was almost too sweet, but the clementine produced a lot of pulp and juice, so the flavor was intense. This one rated 4 glasses, and switching back to sugar with the thoroughly muddled clementine might be the way to go.

Finally, after some luck finding Demerara sugar at Central Market, I tried one more round. The precise version of the recipe didn't overwhelm me; it was quite strong, and the whiskey and bitters really dominated. I gave it 2.5 glasses. So I upped the sugar to half a teaspoon and cut down to two dashes of bitters. That helped, but only up to a 3-glass rating. Finally, I added cherries to the muddling, and all that did was make the final sips ridiculously sweet -- 3 glasses for that one, too.

Phew. That's a lot of Old-Fashioneding. And when I finally got around to whipping my notes into a blog post, I was surprised to see the two versions that scored the best -- the original bourbon recipe, with orange bitters, and the Seagram's with Peychaud. It had been months, so I made them again. Always check your work.

I made the first with Woodford Reserve bourbon, and it did not disappoint. It's a great drink, smooth but with a good amount of bite. The score remains 4.5 glasses, and this remains my favorite variation.

But what of that odd combination of Seagram's and Peychaud's? Surely that was a fluke, right? Well, yeah. Whatever I liked about it the first time didn't come back around this time. It wasn't terrible -- I'd bump it to a 3.5-glass rating -- but it wasn't as gulpably awesome as I remembered. The whiskey just doesn't hold up well enough. Who knows, maybe I'd had a bad day and really needed a drink.

The Old-Fashioned being as, well, old as it is, there are no doubt a million variations and techniques I didn't get to. (In fact, in one bar in Corpus Christi, I was shocked to be served one that was shaken, and it wasn't nearly as bad as I feared it would be.) But I think I've done quite enough research on this concoction for now.