Old Fashioned - History

History

The first documented definition of the word "cocktail" was in response to a reader's letter asking to define the word in the May 6, 1806, issue of The Balance and Columbia Repository in Hudson, New York. In the May 13, 1806, issue, the paper's editor wrote that it was a potent concoction of spirits, bitters, water, and sugar; it was also referred to at the time as a bittered sling. J.E. Alexander describes the cocktail similarly in 1833, as he encountered it in New York City, as being rum, gin, or brandy, significant water, bitters, and sugar, though he includes nutmeg as well.

By the 1860s, it was common enough for orange curaçao, absinthe and other liqueurs to be added that, as first mentioned in The Chicago Daily Tribune on July 25, 1880, the original concoction, albeit in different proportions, was being called "old-fashioned" and came back into vogue itself. The most popular of the in-vogue "old-fashioned" cocktails were made with whiskey, according to a Chicago barman, quoted in The Chicago Daily Tribune in 1882, with rye being more popular than Bourbon. The recipe he describes is a similar combination of spirits, bitters, water and sugar of seventy-six years earlier.

The alleged first use of the specific name "Old Fashioned" for a Bourbon whiskey cocktail was in the 1880s, at the Pendennis Club, a gentlemen’s club founded in 1881 in Louisville, Kentucky. The recipe is said to have been invented by a bartender at that club in honor of Colonel James E. Pepper, a prominent bourbon distiller, who brought it to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel bar in New York City.,