A Visual Timeline of the Old Fashioned, From the Whiskey Cocktail to the Oaxaca

Ordering an Old Fashioned in 2026 is no cause for commotion. You ask for the drink, specify the liquor, and watch the bartender mix it up with just sugar, bitters, and booze. But that wasn’t always the case. While the Old Fashioned is often recognized as one of the world’s first cocktails, behind the drink as we know it today lies a succession of preceding concoctions beginning over 200 years ago.

Each iteration wasn’t necessarily a forward step. Some Old Fashioned reinventions brought oddball ingredients into the recipe, disrupting the drink’s flavors and textures. Nonetheless, as Robert Simonson lays out in his book, “The Old-Fashioned: The Story of the World’s First Classic Cocktail, with Recipes and Lore,” every milestone in the Old Fashioned canon helped guide the drink to its current status as a classic cocktail.

From early instances of blending bitters with whiskey to modern-day riffs, here’s a timeline of the Old Fashioned.

1806: Bitters Meet Whiskey
The Drink: The Whiskey Cocktail

The Whiskey Cocktail, the first concoction in the Old Fashioned’s iconic lineage, predates the word “cocktail” as it is currently defined. The first aromatic bitters were invented in London around 1690. By the late 1700s, bitters made their way to the shores of the newly founded United States, and Americans began mixing them with whiskey to make Whiskey Cocktails. From then into the early 1800s, the Whiskey Cocktail became a favorite drink in the new independent country.

In 1806, the newspaper The Balance and Columbian Repository defined a “cock-tail” as “a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.” At this point, an official recipe for the Whiskey Cocktail had yet to be published, but the bitters-and-booze drinks early Americans were concocting most likely fell within the definition’s guidelines.

According to Simonson, the earliest recipe for the Whiskey Cocktail didn’t appear until 1862 in “Jerry Thomas’ Bartender’s Guide: How to Mix Drinks,” the first cocktail recipe book published in English. Thomas’s account of the Whiskey Cocktail looks more similar to later iterations of the Old Fashioned than some of the intermediate versions. According to his recipe, the Whiskey Cocktail includes gum syrup — modern drinkers can exchange it for simple syrup — a half “wine-glass of whiskey,” a few dashes of bitters, and crushed ice.

1862: Bartenders Make ‘Improvements’
The Drink: The Improved Whiskey Cocktail

In the mid-19th century, European products like maraschino liqueur and absinthe began infiltrating the U.S., expanding American bartenders’ repertoire and, in turn, enhancing the country’s burgeoning cocktail scene. With a new suite of liqueurs and cordials at their disposal, bartenders began making “improved” versions of already-developed drinks. The Whiskey Cocktail was no exception. The Improved Whiskey Cocktail, as written in Thomas’s seminal book, calls for rye or bourbon, maraschino liqueur, simple syrup, absinthe, and both Peychaud’s and Angostura bitters.

The Whiskey Cocktail had been in vogue long before 1862, and, as Simonson illustrates in his book, the publication of the “improved” version engendered a schism among the drink’s devotees: Purists (many of whom were high-brow, educated drinkers) shunned the new European additions, while others preferred the zhuzhed-up version. The advent of the Improved Whiskey Cocktail and the divide it invoked set the stage for a decades-long debate between sticking to the basics and reinventing the classic.

1888: The Name “Old-Fashioned” Is Coined
The Drink: The Old Fashioned Cocktail Method 2

Bartender Theodore Proulx’s “Bartender’s Manual,” published in 1888, may be best known as the book that first named the “Old-Fashioned,” but it also marked significant evolutions to the drink. Whereas previous Whiskey Cocktails used gum syrup or simple syrup, late-19th-century bartenders began dampening and muddling raw sugar at the bottom of a rocks glass before building the other ingredients atop that base. At the same time, mixologists pivoted toward chilling the drink with a single large chunk of ice.

Nowhere is the split between simple and souped-up as apparent as it is in Proulx’s book. In it, he offers two methods: Method No. 1 includes absinthe, and No. 2 features a mix of sugar, angostura bitters, simple syrup, and whiskey. More drinkers preferred the Old Fashioned in its purest, most Whiskey Cocktail-reminiscent form, making Proulx’s second method more influential than his first.

1934: Muddled Fruit Enters the Chat
The Drink: The Burke’s Old-Fashioned

The interwar and postwar periods incited a new question for the Old Fashioned: to add fruit or not. Mixologist Harman Burney Burke’s recipe, published in 1934 in “Burke’s Complete Cocktail & Drinking Recipes,” is considered to be the first that includes muddled fruit — Burke uses a slice of orange and a lemon peel. The rest of the cocktail is made up of whiskey, raw sugar, bitters, and absinthe or curaçao.

Naysayers began to compare it to fruit salad doused in whiskey. Nevertheless, Burke’s recipe caught on among some drinkers and set off a trend of Old Fashioneds textured with floating bits of citrus pulp. From the 1930s to the 21st century, whenever someone ordered an Old Fashioned, it most likely came studded with fruit solids. As Simonson puts it, “For purists, Burke’s formula marks the beginning of a very dark age for the drink.”

1939: Regional Riffs Appear
The Drink: The Wisconsin Old Fashioned

At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a trio of brothers with the last name Korbel debuted their brandy from California, setting off an interest in domestic versions of the spirit. Korbel’s popularity spread to Wisconsin, where German immigrants took to the domestic brandy for its taste reminiscent of schnapps. From there, the state’s obsession with American brandy stuck.

Then came the onset of Prohibition when bootlegged liquors shuffled around the U.S. in underground markets. These low-quality spirits often had off-putting tastes and prompted drinkers to begin incorporating ingredients like flavored soda and cherries into their cocktails to mask the unwanted flavors.

But the Wisconsin Old Fashioned, also known as the Brandy Old Fashioned, wouldn’t be cemented as a regional quaff until World War II when grains were rationed to support the war effort. So, Wisconsinites substituted brandy for whiskey in their cocktails, spawning the Wisconsin Old Fashioned. In addition to Korbel brandy, the drink includes a sugar cube muddled with bitters, lemon lime soda, and two maraschino cherries.

1990s and 2000s: New-Age Bartenders Return to Pre-Prohibition Palates
The Drink: The Old Fashioned

The Old Fashioned began to reemerge in the 1990s and 2000s during the time of the modern cocktail renaissance when craft bartenders began revisiting the classics. According to Simonson, it was around this time that bars like Employees Only in Manhattan’s West Village and the now-closed Pegu Club in SoHo opened and revitalized the drink. The mixologists at those bars ditched fruited Old Fashioneds, favoring more classic versions of the cocktail. The dawn of the 21st century cemented the recipe for the Old Fashioned as we know it today. The stripped-down version — just a sugar cube muddled with bitters, rye or bourbon, and an orange twist — was then popularized in the early aughts.

2007: The Modern Classics Emerge
The Drink: The Oaxaca Old Fashioned

Once the Old Fashioned came back into favor in the early 2000s, new-school bartenders began to experiment with riffs. One of the most popular innovations was the Oaxaca Old Fashioned, conceived in 2007 by Phil Ward at Death & Co., a trailblazing bar in New York City’s now-renowned craft cocktail scene. (The popularity of Ward’s Oaxaca Old Fashioned is comparable to that of the bacon fat-washed Benton’s Old Fashioned, invented by Don Lee in 2007 at Please Don’t Tell, just a few blocks over from Death & Co.).

Ward was early to the agave-based spirit craze that would eventually take over the U.S. and, as such, opted for both tequila and mezcal in his take on the Old Fashioned. Now, the drink is served in cocktail bars worldwide. According to Simonson, Ward prefers El Tesoro for the tequila and Del Maguey for the mezcal in the drink. The rest of the Oaxaca Old Fashioned includes agave nectar as the sweetener and angostura bitters. It is garnished with an orange twist lit on fire, which extinguishes once plunked into the glass.

2010s: The Classic Cocktail Becomes a Smoke Show
The Drink: The Smoked Old Fashioned

Smoking cocktails became popular in NYC in the late 2000s, and while there is no one bartender to whom the Smoked Old Fashioned can be attributed, the trend came from the craft cocktail revolution. Smoke melds well with the robust flavors of bourbon or rye. Add in the bacon fat notes in the Beton’s Old Fashioned, and smoke makes all the more sense.

However, Smoked Old Fashioneds — made with either a smoking gun or in a smoking chamber — soon became ubiquitous. So much so that some bartenders look back on the fad, which is still going strong in some places, with disdain.

*Image retrieved from Adam Jaime via unsplash.com

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