Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The Maple Old Fashioned!

Nothing fancy. Just some comfort food before the holidays.

I am literally sipping this drink as I finish this article.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. The official Christmas lighting ceremony for my hometown happens tonight. The Christmas museum in town is three doors down from the bar. As you read this, I am insanely busy and need the alcoholic equivalent of comfort food. Let’s make a nice, easy Maple Old Fashioned to celebrate fall while it lasts. Here’s the recipe.

Maple Old Fashioned

2 ½ oz 1776 Bourbon

½ oz Grade A maple syrup

2-3 dropperfuls Cherry Maple Smoked Bitters

Add maple syrup, bitters, and ice cubes to a large old-fashioned glass. Add bourbon and stir. Garnish with a Luxardo cherry.

The Old Fashioned is one of the oldest cocktails we’ve got on the books. Nothing’s ever set in stone when it comes to cocktail history; success has many mothers. Everyone wants to claim that their bar “invented” the Old Fashioned. For the sake of a good story, I’ll point to James Pepper, a member of The Pedennis Club in Louisville, Kentucky. James was an old-school Kentucky Colonel with his own distillery, a fantastic moustache, a gift for bombastic salesmanship, and a clever, powerful wife. Mr Pepper claimed his “Old 1776” Whiskey recipe was an heirloom from his grandfather, dating back to before the Revolutionary War. His eternal partner, Ella Offutt Pepper, the “Queen of the Turf,” came to the relationship with some wealth of her own and a fine pedigree in the horse racing business. When the distillery went on the auction block due to an industry-wide glut, Ella purchased it back with several of her prize racehorses. None of her contemporaries dared bid against the indomitable Ms. Pepper.

James would ride from Kentucky to New York in an ornate railcar named “The Old Pepper,” decorated with images of his whiskey brand. His liquor was the first label in Kentucky to be bottled at the distillery. Likewise, Col. Pepper invented the “signature strip stamp” to assure consumers of the quality of the whiskey in the bottle — a marketing gimmick that evolved into the Bottled in Bond Act of 1897. There is no doubt in my mind that Col. Pepper claimed the Old Fashioned as his personal invention when it was poured at the Waldorf Hotel bar in New York, running roughshod over any recipes that might have had prior claim to the name.

I cannot emphasize enough how easy it is to make this cocktail. I converted the measurements to tablespoons when my uncle, a cocktail novice, needed drinks for a golf trip. (Five tablespoons of bourbon, one tablespoon of syrup, if you’re interested.) It worked fine. I make my Old Fashioneds in a mixing beaker at the bar to keep them as cold as possible before service, but at home I toss everything into a glass and stir it with a plastic chopstick.

A book-standard Old Fashioned uses plain sugar as its sweetener. This can take the form of a dissolved sugar cube, simple syrup, or demerara syrup, depending on what you’ve got in the kitchen. However, any sweetener will work very well with an appropriate spirit. Maple syrup is absolutely perfect with bourbon. Honey’s wonderful with Irish whiskey. A sweet liquor like Amaretto’s a prime example; my Ranger is still a top seller at Hemingway’s. Look at the Old Fashioned as a template, instead of a recipe written in stone. It’s not hard to make your own classic comfort cocktail.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Ingredient shot. Three ingredients is cool.

1776 Bourbon: I decided to try the modern version of Col. Pepper’s classic for this cocktail. It’s undoubtedly good bourbon, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between this and Buffalo Trace or Woodford Reserve. Use your favourite bourbon here. Personally, I’d rather have a dense, peppery rye like Sazerac in my Old Fashioneds, but a smooth, buttery Old Fashioned is really good at the end of a long shift.

Maple Syrup: The real stuff, Grade A, accept no substitutes. I might play with Grade B here, but I don’t want the maple to overrun the cocktail completely.

Cherry Maple Smoked Bitters: Classically, Angostura is the bitters of choice for an Old Fashioned. But there are a ton of specialty bitters out there that are clearly meant for bourbon. These particular bitters are on the shelf at Meijer, a regional big-box realtor located in the Midwest. I know that Old Forrester makes its own line of premium bitters, which can be found in specialty gourmet stores. Hunt around and find something that sounds good in your drink, and use it. There are no rules, only guidelines.

Garnish: Never, ever put a maraschino cherry in an Old Fashioned. They’re bright red, flavourless gumballs. Spring for a jar of Luxardo cherries. A Luxardo soaked in bourbon is one of life’s little pleasures. Don’t skip out on it.

My home bar is Hemingway’s Underground, the hottest cocktail bar in pretty little Medina, Ohio. I’m behind the stick Wednesday-Saturday, 4-10. Last call’s at midnight. Swing on by and I’ll make a drink for you … or anything else from our little Happy Hour here at Wonkette.

OPEN THREAD!