4 Amazing Old Fashioned Recipes

Here, we present what we believe to be the pinnacle of the classic Old Fashioned. A simple and elegant cocktail that predates nearly all of the cocktails in the book. Buffalo Trace bourbon, demerara sugar syrup, a splash of water and a few dashes of angostura bitters combine to create a special kind of magic.

One of the first recorded mentions of the drink was way back in the early 1800s when the newly coined ‘cocktail’ was defined in an issue of “The Balance and Columbian Repository” in the small upstate town of Hudson, some 120 miles upstream of New York City, as “a potent concoction of spirits, bitters, water, and sugar”.

Time may have altered many things but the classic old fashioned stays true to its origins.

Our Cherry Cola Old Fashioned is made with bourbon from the most awarded distillery on the planet. The Buffalo Trace Distillery was founded at the confluence of an ancient track forged by the mighty buffalo making their way across the American wilderness and the clean, crisp and pure waters of the Kentucky River.

With over 200 years of heritage in making rich and complex barrel aged whiskey with notes of vanilla, toffee and candied fruit, we thought it was just the product to star in our delicious Cherry Cola take on the classic Old Fashioned.

“And it tastes just like cherry cola, C-O-L-A, cola!” - Ray Davies of The Kinks.

Our PB&J Old Fashioned celebrates an unlikely icon of suburban American home cooking, the unassuming Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly the richness of the peanut butter and the slightly acidic sweetness of the jelly (or jam to any of you anglophiles) provides an intriguing and really rather well weighted bump of flavour into this fun take on the old standard.

Here, we use Sheep Dog Peanut Butter Whiskey, backed up by Buffalo Trace Bourbon, alongside a splash of crème de mure and just a few dashes of Regan’s Orange Bitters - a favourite flavour enhancer of ours, which is based upon a 1930s recipe from “The Gentleman’s Companion”.

This Salted Maple Old Fashioned is an original creation from our own Kocktail curator, formerly the senior bartender at the Savoy Hotel’s Beaufort Bar when it was crowned the best hotel bar in the world.

We’ve balanced Buffalo Trace bourbon whiskey with Seignette cognac and a splash of unctuous salted maple syrup. We then added just a drop of banana liqueur to help the maple syrup impart its rich sweetness into the mix, whilst allowing the cocktail to remain a decidedly mature affair.

This is a cocktail to sit back and sink into…