Tremendous Old Fashioned

Pay attention. The Old Fashioned. THE Old Fashioned. The original cocktail. The FIRST cocktail. Before there was anything else, there was this — bourbon, sugar, bitters, a little water — and many people don't know this, they think the martini was first, they're WRONG, the martini came later, the martini is a CHILD compared to the Old Fashioned. The neighbor who taught me this drink lived to be 102. Could be a coincidence. Probably not.

And somewhere along the way — and this is one of the great crimes of the modern era, right up there with frozen margaritas and microwaved steak — people started putting FRUIT in it. Big chunks of orange. Maraschino cherries. Some of them MUDDLE the fruit. They take a beautiful Old Fashioned and they SMASH a piece of orange into it like they're angry at the drink. A tragedy. A disaster. That bartender on TV — you know the one — does this wrong, every single time, and the cameras keep rolling and nobody stops him. DO NOT MUDDLE THE ORANGE.

A real Old Fashioned is bourbon, a sugar cube, two dashes of bitters, and a few drops of water to bring the sugar together. That's it. A twist of orange peel goes ON TOP — on top, not IN the drink, ON TOP — and you express the oils over the surface and drop it in. The Old Fashioned is a drink for grown adults who have things figured out. It's for people who sit down and say something. It's not a slushie. It's not a sour. It's a statement. And this one — Bigly's Old Fashioned — is the greatest statement ever made in a rocks glass. Nobody disputes this.

That's a real Old Fashioned. The way it was meant to be. The way the gentlemen at the original bars made it, before everything got ruined by cocktail influencers with their twelve garnishes and their smoke domes and their dehydrated rose petals. You don't need a smoke dome. You don't need edible glitter. You need bourbon, sugar, bitters, and an orange peel. Four things. That's the whole story. You make this drink, you sip it slow, and you sit there like a person who's earned it. Because you have. You made the BEST Old Fashioned. Beautiful.