The Old Fashioned: A 200-Year Genealogy

The drink we call the Old Fashioned has, depending on how you count, somewhere between eight and twelve distinct historically-documented forms, each of which has been someone's "the right way to make it" at some point. The name was not applied to the drink until at least 1881, by which time the drink itself was already 75 years old. This essay walks the family tree from the 1806 root to the 2025 leaves.

Generation 1 (1806 – 1862): The bittered sling

The earliest documented ancestor is the bittered sling, defined in The Balance and Columbian Repository, 13 May 1806:

"Cock-tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters — it is vulgarly called a bittered sling..."

Four ingredients. No specified spirit (Hudson, NY in 1806 would have meant rye whiskey or, possibly, applejack). No specified bitters (the implied default is Stoughton's Bitters, the dominant patent bitters of the era). No specified sweetener (loaf sugar dissolved in water with a muddler — the spoon-and-glass technique we still use is unchanged). And critically: no ice, which was not yet commercially available behind a bar.

This is the structural ancestor not just of the Old Fashioned but of the entire bittered-spirit-and-sugar family, which includes the Sazerac, the Manhattan, the Brandy Cocktail, and a dozen others. They all share this DNA.

Generation 2 (1862 – 1881): The Whiskey Cocktail

When Jerry Thomas catalogued the drink in 1862's How to Mix Drinks, he did not call it the Old Fashioned. There was no "old" version yet to compare it to. He called it the Whiskey Cocktail:

"Take 3 dashes Boker's bitters, 1 wine-glass of whiskey, 1 lump of sugar dissolved in a little water. Fill one-third of the mixing-glass with ice, and stir it well. Strain into a fancy red wine glass."

Note the technique: strained into a stemmed glass, served up, no garnish. The drink Thomas was making is closer in form to a modern Manhattan than to a modern Old Fashioned. Ice is in the mixing glass for chilling and dilution; it is not in the served drink.

By the 1876 edition Thomas adds a refinement called the Improved Whiskey Cocktail:

"[Add] 2 dashes of curaçoa or maraschino, and 1 dash of absinthe."

This is the structural ancestor of the Sazerac (which substitutes Peychaud's bitters for Boker's, cognac for whiskey in its earliest forms, and absinthe for the curaçao/maraschino additions). The Improved version represents a turn toward complexity that the late 19th century broadly embraced.

Generation 3 (1881 – 1920): The "Old Fashioned"

By the 1880s, the unimproved version — just spirit, sugar, bitters, water — had begun to be requested by name as the Old Fashioned, in self-conscious contrast to the increasingly elaborate alternatives. The Pendennis Club in Louisville claimed authorship of the name in 1881, and while that claim is unverified (Wondrich treats it skeptically), the name is in print by the mid-1880s.

The 1895 edition of George J. Kappeler's Modern American Drinks gives the recipe in nearly its modern form:

"Dissolve a small lump of sugar with a little water in a whiskey-glass; add two dashes Angostura bitters, a small piece ice, a piece lemon-peel, one jigger whiskey. Mix with small bar-spoon and serve, leaving spoon in glass."

Two changes from Thomas's 1862 version are decisive:

Ice in the served drink — technological, possible only after refrigeration normalized.
Lemon peel garnish — aromatic, cosmetic, also a 1880s addition.

This is the canonical Old Fashioned. It is, by 1900, a well-defined drink with a well-defined audience — the gentleman of conservative tastes, the man who orders his drink in deliberate contrast to the showier options on the back bar. The name is doing identity work.

Generation 4 (1920 – 1933): Prohibition disfigurement

Prohibition broke many drinks, but it broke the Old Fashioned in a particularly visible way. With access to good whiskey limited and the available spirits often crude, bartenders began to muddle in fruit — an orange wedge, a maraschino cherry, sometimes pineapple — to mask the flavor of bathtub product. The "muddled fruit" Old Fashioned of the 1925 – 1965 era is a Prohibition workaround that became, by sheer inertia, the dominant form for forty years.

Crockett's 1935 Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book, written immediately after Repeal, captures the era's confusion. He gives two recipes side by side: one austere (the pre-Prohibition form), one with muddled fruit, with the wry note that the "older" form was preferred by the older patrons. Embury's 1948 Fine Art of Mixing Drinks is bluntly hostile to the muddled-fruit version, calling it "the worst drink in America."

Generation 5 (1965 – 1995): The Wisconsin Brandy Old Fashioned and the Suburban Cherry Soda

By the 1960s the muddled-fruit form had migrated from compensation to convention. In Wisconsin, the dominant local form substituted brandy for whiskey (a regional preference traced to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair) and added soda water — either lemon-lime or sour-style. By the 1970s and 80s, the version most working bartenders in the U.S. would have been asked to produce was: muddled orange wedge + cherry, sugar, bitters, whiskey or brandy, ice, topped with cherry juice or 7-Up.

This drink — let us call it the Suburban Old Fashioned — bears nearly no structural resemblance to the 1895 form. It is sweet, fruity, dilute, and bears a maraschino cherry. It is also, fairly, what most American adults of a certain generation think of when they hear the word Old Fashioned. Disliking that fact is not a productive use of a working bartender's time. Knowing how to make both forms competently is.

Generation 6 (1995 – 2015): The Wondrich Restoration

The cocktail-revival movement of the late 1990s and 2000s — centered initially in San Francisco (Sasha Petraske's Milk & Honey opened in New York in 2000), then spreading nationally — treated the muddled-fruit form as a target of correction. Audrey Saunders, Dale DeGroff, Sasha Petraske, and especially David Wondrich in his 2007 Imbibe! explicitly returned to the 1895 Kappeler recipe as the "true" form: sugar, bitters, whiskey, ice, citrus peel.

Wondrich's contribution was as much pedagogical as historical: he made the case that the muddled-fruit form was an aberration, a wartime substitution that became habit. His recipe is, almost verbatim, the 1895 Kappeler. The brown-sugar / demerara / rich-syrup variations that became common in the 2010s are minor modulations on this Wondrich-restored base.

Generation 7 (2015 – present): The mutation phase

Once a "correct" version is restored, mutation resumes. Contemporary bars have produced, in the last decade:

The Smoked Old Fashioned — finished with applewood or hickory smoke under a glass dome.
The Tequila / Mezcal Old Fashioned — substitutes agave spirit, often with agave nectar replacing sugar.
The Maple Old Fashioned — replaces sugar with grade-B maple syrup.
The Coffee Old Fashioned — adds cold-brew concentrate or coffee liqueur.
The Hot Honey Old Fashioned — adds chili-infused honey.
The Bottled / Aged Old Fashioned — pre-batched, aged 30+ days in barrel.
The Clarified Milk-Punch Old Fashioned — clarified by milk-acid coagulation, served chilled and crystal clear.

None of these are the "real" Old Fashioned; all of them are valid descendants of the 1806 bittered sling. The tree branches and continues to branch.

Why the genealogy matters at the well

Three operational principles fall out of the family tree:

The drink does not have a single right answer. It has a canonical answer (Wondrich-restored 1895 Kappeler), several historically-attested variants (Improved, Sazerac, Suburban), and an open frontier of modern mutations. A guest who orders an Old Fashioned could be asking for any of them. The bartender's job is to ask which.
The classifying question is "muddled fruit or not." Every other variation (whiskey vs. brandy, simple syrup vs. sugar cube, demerara vs. white) is downstream. Settle that question first.
The garnish is communicative. A Wondrich-restored Old Fashioned with a Luxardo cherry says one thing. The same drink with a flag (orange + Maraschino cherry) says something else. The same drink in a rocks glass with a hand-cut 2-inch ice cube and an expressed orange peel says yet a third thing. Choose the garnish that matches the drink you actually built.

The Old Fashioned has survived 220 years not because it has remained the same but because its structural premise — bittered sweetened spirit, modulated by ice and citrus oil — is robust enough to bear a great deal of mutation without losing its identity. That is also the working definition of a canonical drink.

The Manhattan, the Sazerac, and the Brandy Cocktail are the Old Fashioned's three direct cousins. The next post in this series treats the Sazerac. Send a request to The Bar Lab if there's a specific drink-genealogy you'd like covered next.