Don Draper mixes an Old Fashioned on Mad Men
By Megan Cole
It’s time to have a talk. It’s a serious one because, well, many of us have been doing it wrong for a long time. There are some terrible cocktails being made in the world. Some people are trying, and that’s always half the battle, but many are just mixing up booze for the sole reason of intoxication, and that’s a pretty terrible reason to make a cocktail.
It wasn’t until my mid/late-twenties that I began to understand that a cocktail is not what I grew up drinking at the bar. Just for starters, anything with Sour Puss or whipped cream-flavoured vodka is a far cry from a cocktail. As a foodie and a keen home cook, it was a fairly natural transition towards experimenting with cocktails, and particularly tasting some of the classics.
Humans may have come up with some great technological advances, but some things are classics for a reason, and they continue to stand the test of time. One of the most perfect cocktails on earth is the Old Fashioned. In a nutshell, an Old Fashioned is a combination of water (ice), sugar, alcohol (often bourbon or rye), a few dashes of bitters and some orange. Something I’ve learned during my short cocktail education is that two of the most important parts of an Old Fashioned are first the bitters and second the ice. Also, please, whatever you do, don’t shake an Old Fashioned.
Never heard of bitters before? Essentially, they are an alcohol-based product, which were historically made using botanicals such as herbs, bark or roots such as cassia and orange peel. For decades, people used bitters for medicinal purposes. In fact, the earliest forms of Angostura Bitters, which are often used in an Old Fashioned, were made in Venezuela in 1824 by a German Dr. Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Sieger, and they were intended as a cure for sea sickness and stomach maladies.
Even though bitters have been hidden away on grocery store shelves for ages, in small bottles near the non-alcoholic wine and beer, that once-ignored section is seeing a revival. Craft distilleries like Victoria Spirits and Dashfire Bitters are reinventing bitters and they are becoming a popular tool at bars across North America and Europe. New interpretations of bitters are allowing mixologists and bartenders to make a mark on the classics, and even chefs and bakers are now adding them to their arsenal.
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