The Sipping News

There's something about the lowly Wisconsin classic, the Brandy Old-Fashioned, that make cocktail writers want to pen essays in its honor. I wrote my own lordly take on the peculiar refreshment in Imbibe magazine earlier this year. Now I see Mssr. Toby Cecchini has composed an ode in none other than the New York Times. Was there ever a local speciality more reviled, yet celebrated? Toby! Fellow Wisconsinite! We should meet for a round of BOFs. I'm buying. [NYT's T Magazine]

The new web-zine Liquor.com has been publishing for a week or so now. On the last day of November, Camper English weighed in with a primer on bitters. I hate him, however, for recommending Bitter Truth's Celery Bitters when it's currently impossible to get them in New York.

The pissant, parvenu, party crashers who tactlessly invaded Obama's first White House state dinner also own a bankrupt Virginia winery that uses plastic cups in the tasting room! [Dr. Vino]

Shane C. Welch, the owner of Six Point brewery in Red Hook, grew up in Milwaukee. I like his beers even more now! [NY Times]

Jamie Goode's decided Nebbiolo is a wonderful grape. He's just finding this out?

The Old Fashioned Bar

Some of the best ideas are the simplest. Bartender Neyah White has come up with one of the best, and simplest, I've seen in a long time: The Old Fashioned Bar.

Participating in SFChefs.Food.Wine in Union Square, San Francisco, he set up a station where drinkers would have access to every possible ingredient option on the way to cocktail hour: whiskey, sweetener, bitters. I'll let White tell the rest:

Rather than committing to one spirit, I decided to call upon my favorite producers and gather as big an array of whisk(e)y as the bar could hold. In the end I had a full 30 brands.

To compliment all the spirits, I went a little over on the bitters and sugar. In addition to Angostura, Peychaud's and Regan's, I brought 8 homemade bitters and tinctures. For sugar I had traditional cubes, Muscavodo, Rapadura, Agave Nectar, Lavender Honey and beautiful Japanese sugar that was light like confectioners sugar but tasted like cane.

I had this selection out front so guests would come up, I would hand them a glass and muddle and coach them through making and old-fashioned. We talked about the options and then I would cut ice chunks while they muddled and mixed. I went over pretty well if i do say so myself.

Someone should make this a permanent feature in a bar somewhere.

"Mad Men" Drink With Accuracy

Get me writing about "Mad Men" and cocktails at the same time, and you have a happy reporter.

I've spent a good portion of the past month researching and writing a piece for the New York Times on whether the period experts over at "Mad Men" know what they're doing, history-wise, when they hand Don Draper an Old Fashioned and give Roger Sterling a Vodka Martini. Turns out: Yes they do.

Of the experts I interviewed for the article, none proved more valuable than Brian Rea, the 82-year-old career New York bartender ("21" Club, Little Club, etc.) who remembers who and what he served when he was 32. The man's memory is sharp as a tack.

Sixties Accuracy in Every Sip

By ROBERT SIMONSON

EARLY in Season 1 of the AMC series “Mad Men,” Don Draper, the mysterious advertising executive at the core of the show, was seen at home emptying can after can of Fielding beer. Bloggers afflicted with the fact-checking gene quickly noted that there was no Fielding beer in the United States at the time.

“That was a huge mistake,” said Gay Perello, the show’s prop master since the second season. “I hated that label. Hated it.”

Ten years ago, few would have cared whether the executives at Sterling Cooper — the fictional 1960s advertising firm featured in the show, which begins its third season on Sunday — entertained a client with mai tais or bloody marys. But it was the show’s good fortune (or misfortune, depending on how you look at it) to unveil its drink-centric world at a time when a growing fraternity of alcohol enthusiasts is rediscovering America’s rich drinking history. Now, the goof police are out.

Cocktails have been a vital element of the show right from the opening scene, which showed Don Draper sitting in a bar. Before the audience learns his name or his profession, he expresses his drink preference: “Do this again — old-fashioned, please.”

Other than the Fielding lapse, drink historians and barmen of a certain age say that “Mad Men” mostly gets its bibulous world right. Dale DeGroff benefits from a twin perspective. A former bartender at the Rainbow Room, he is often credited with rekindling interest in classic cocktails. But in the early 1970s, he worked at the influential advertising firm Lois Holland Callaway. One of the agency’s clients was Restaurant Associates, which ran such sensations as the Four Seasons and Forum of the Twelve Caesars.

“These ad guys made themselves experts on all the details that needed attention, including everything at the cocktail bars and even the wine lists,” Mr. DeGroff, 60, remembered.

That many ad men drank deeply seems unquestioned. The bartender and bar lore archivist Brian Rea, 82, worked in the 1950s at the Little Club, a popular Midtown restaurant. “Lunch was a big thing,” he said. “They took two and a half hours. We had a lot of agency people come in, from Cunningham & Walsh, BBDO, all having serious lunches with drinks.”

Carlo Marioni, 65, a New York bartender with more than 40 years’ experience who now works at Pietro’s, agreed: “Those years, for lunch, they used to drink three martinis. Then they’d come back before dinner for rusty nails, white spiders.”

If Mr. Rea and others give “Mad Men” high marks for nailing its milieu, part of the credit for this achievement goes to Ms. Perello, 43, who prepares every drink seen on the show, using nonalcoholic ingredients. “We’re definitely the alcohol department,” she said. “I can make an old-fashioned in my sleep now.”

To get an idea of the popular cocktails of the time and how they looked, Ms. Perello relies heavily on a volume from 1992 called “The Art of the Cocktail: 100 Classic Cocktail Recipes,” by Philip Collins. Little is left to chance. “We’re very picky about our glassware. Things are bit bigger and bulkier now. For a martini glass, we go a little smaller and thinner.” Period bottle labels and caps (old-style tax stamps, yes; bar codes, no) are recreated by the graphics department, using old ads as guides.

Occasionally, expediency dictates a decision. When an accounts executive was sent a case of gin by some British colleagues last season, Ms. Perello chose Tanqueray, though Beefeater then dominated the London dry gin market in the United States. “Tanqueray has not changed their bottle,” she explained. “With Beefeater, the bottles are completely different than they were. And I needed 12 bottles.”

Liquor is not only an integral part of many plotlines (last season, it played a pivotal role in a car crash, a divorce, a rape and two career implosions), but often a telling sign of character. When it comes to choosing a character’s poison, Ms. Perello said, many people have input, starting with the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner: “Matt will say, ‘I want them to have a brown liquor.’ And I’ll go, ‘Let’s do a nonblended Scotch, because this is a person who would appreciate that.’ ”

The cocktail historian David Wondrich, 48, thinks an old-fashioned is a conservative choice for the young Draper, but considers his preference for Canadian Club “exactly right. We’d had years of destruction of the American whiskey industry up until then. So the Canadian stuff was viewed as being pretty good.”

“The big Scotches were Bell’s, Black & White, Teacher’s, White Horse,” Mr. Rea said. “When you’re drinking Canadian Club, you’re showing people you drink a better brand” of whiskey. He and Mr. Wondrich also said Betty Draper’s taste for Tom Collinses and vodka gimlets was spot on.

Thirsts on “Mad Men” have not slackened in Season 3. Draper will vary his rye intake with Old Overholt, while Roger Sterling, Draper’s boss and the show’s resident booze philosopher, broadens his palate. About Sterling’s beloved vodka (bottles of Smirnoff made frequent cameos in earlier episodes) Mr. Rea said, “Martinis were the big thing in those days. Vodka was just beginning to come on strong.”

This season, Sterling gets his hands on some prized contraband: Soviet-made Stolichnaya (then not available in the United States). His priorities remain solidly in place. “Help yourself,” he tells a colleague. “Not the Stoli.”

The Old-Fashioned Makes a Comeback

My first assignment from the Dining Section of the New York Times appears today. And nothing could have made me happier than to make my debut writing about a subject dear to my heart: the Old-Fashioned, a drink, I am glad to say, that is quite popular around New York these days. I mention a few places in town where you can get a good one; I recommend them all.

Take a Sip of History

By ROBERT SIMONSON

THE old-fashioned may finally be earning its name.

One of the most venerable of whiskey-based cocktails, it has a history that stretches back farther than the martini’s. For decades it has suffered under the reputation of something your grandmother drank — overly sweet, fruit-laden and spritzed-up. But grandma wouldn’t recognize what’s happened to it lately.

The old-fashioned is one of the most requested mixed drinks at some of New York’s newest and most self-consciously artisanal drinking dens, including Prime Meats in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn; Elsa in the East Village; Rye in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; Jack the Horse in Brooklyn Heights; and the White Slab Palace on the Lower East Side.

Cocktail aficionados say it couldn’t have happened to a nicer drink.

“The old-fashioned is one of the original cocktails, in the true sense of the word,” said Damon Boelte, bar director at Prime Meats. “It’s kind of like having a Model T on your menu.”

It’s so old that it was called a “whiskey cocktail” until late-19th-century parvenus like the martini and manhattan forced purists to order an “old fashioned” whiskey cocktail. But while the martini and the manhattan came through the cocktail dark ages of the 1970s and ’80s with much of their dignity, the old-fashioned developed a personality disorder.

Its majestically austere profile (basically a slug of rye with minuscule touches of water, bitters and sugar) was tarted up with a muddled orange slice and maraschino cherry, and a diluting dose of soda water. This rendition has its advocates, and remains popular in supper clubs across America. But it sends shudders down the spines of the new breed of cocktail classicists.

“A bastardization of the original drink,” said Kevin Jaszek, a bartender at Smith & Mills in TriBeCa who designed the cocktail list at Elsa.

Disciples of the cocktail renaissance, like Mr. Boelte and Mr. Jaszek, have restored the old-fashioned to what they feel is its rightful form — “back to integrity,” as Julie Reiner put it. The Clover Club, her Boerum Hill bar, opened last June with an entire menu section devoted to the old-fashioned and its variants.

Yes, variants. Devotees are not completely doctrinaire in their recipes, varying the type of bitters or sweeteners used.

And old-fashioneds built on bourbon (PDT in the East Village), rum (the Oak Bar) and tequila (Death & Co. in the East Village) are not unheard-of. Just keep that maraschino cherry well away.

The Best Old Fashioned in Town

I like to sample different bars' takes on the Old Fashioned. These days, seeing an Old Fashioned on a cocktail menu is not an unusual occurance. In fact, it's becoming commonplace. To name a few: at the new East Village bar, Elsa, they make their Old Fashioned with Old Overholt rye, muddled brown sugar and no muddled fruit. At Jack the Horse in Brooklyn Heights they use Rittenhouse rye, vanilla pear syrup, a homemade aromatic tincture, and an orange twist. At White Slab Palace on the Lower East Side they employ, uh, Maker's Mark, blood orange and cherry liqueur. (Haven't tried that last one; I may not.)

But the best rendition of the classic I have encountered is at Prime Meats, a new bar in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. It is simplicity itself, with one significant, world-changing alteration. There's the Rittenhouse rye, there's the sugar. But no Angostura. Instead, bartender Damon Braces has created his own bartlett pear bitters made from a pear tree in the backyard of the bar. In the backyard of the bar. Then, to better match the character of the bitters, the drink is garnished with a big lemon peel, as opposed the more common orange peel.

This is a fantastic Old Fashioned, and I'm rather obsessed with it. I don't know if I've ever enjoyed drinking an Old Fashioned as much as I like drinking this one (and I enjoy my Old Fashioneds). It's so bright in taste, it's sparkles in your nose and on your tongue. Instead of heavy and earthboard, its light and airy. It's the first Old Fashioned I've ever had that I'd thought could be an ideal summer drink. Plus, it is beautiful to look at. Golden.

Strictly speaking, this is not an Old Fashioned because of the change in bitters. But it falls closely enough within the drink model for me to think of it as the best Old Fashioned in New York. Hyperbole, I know.

Brandy Old-Fashioneds in Imbibe

I've written about the Wisconsin state drink, the Brandy Old-Fashioned, many times on this site. Imbibe, however, recently gave me the opportunity to weigh in on the drink's provenance in print. The article appears in the new March/April issue as a back-page "Quench" feature. I guess, at this point, I could be called the leading journalist authority on this weird, but tasty cocktail. An odd claim to fame, but I'll take it.

Where Brandy's Always in Fashion

Every evening at 5 sharp my father used to fix my mother the first of a few Old Fashioneds she would enjoy during the cocktail hour. I never thought much of it while growing up in Milwaukee; to me, she was just sipping on a boring drink with a fuddy-duddy name. Many years later, however, when I developed a respect for this venerable classic cocktail, I realized that Mom hadn’t actually been enjoying a whiskey-based libation. Turns out, she was a brandy drinker.

Ask for a Brandy Old Fashioned in New York, San Francisco or Seattle, and you’re likely to receive a puzzled, skeptical look. Put in your order at any bar in the Badger State, however, and your bartender will get right to work.

Wisconsin loves brandy. For many years the state consumed more of the brown spirit than anyone else in the U.S., only recently falling behind Maryland (for reasons unknown). Not surprisingly for a population better known for its beer intake, Wisconsinites don’t go for fancy, expensive brandies. Their favorite brand is Korbel, which, with its light body and limited flavor profile, makes for an adept mixer. In fact, of the 360,000 cases of brandy produced by the California-based winery in 2007, some 150,000 went to America’s Dairyland. Many of those went to a Madison tavern aptly called The Old Fashioned, where, on an average weekend night, 200 Brandy Old Fashioneds grace the bar. “You go to Wisconsin and they say, ‘Oh, Korbel makes a champagne, too?’ ” says Margie Healy of Korbel.

But the ritual surrounding the Brandy Old Fashioned goes beyond an insistence on Korbel. Wisconsinites, while sometimes indiscriminate in how much they drink, are deadly specific about what they drink. Each cocktail begins roughly the same: an orange slice and a cherry, muddled in a rocks glass with sugar and Angostura bitters; pour in the brandy and add ice. A call for “sweet” means it’s topped off with 7-Up or Sprite; “sour” gets you sour mix instead of soda pop. And “Press” is finished with a combination of 7-Up and soda water. Jennifer DeBolt, general manager at the Old Fashioned, says that some patrons request their drinks be finished with pickled mushrooms or pickled brussels sprouts. In the northern part of the state, garnish specification is apparently a must.

Why Wisconsin laps up so many barrels of brandy has long been a subject of speculation. The most plausible theory I’ve encountered was laid out in a 2006 article in the Madison paper The Isthmus. Reporter Jerry Minnich pointed out that the wine-making Korbel brothers exhibited their new brandy at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which attracted 27 million visitors, many of them from neighboring Wisconsin. (Not incidentally, nearby Minnesota also likes brandy, and Illinois and Michigan are no slouches.)

So if the how and why of Wisconsin’s brandy affinity make sense, what explains the origins of the misbegotten Old Fashioned? No one seems to know, but the use of brandy in what is traditionally a whiskey cocktail isn’t really that random. After all, an even older whiskey cocktail, the Sazerac, began life as a brandy drink and, structurally, the Brandy Old Fashioned resembles a 19th-century Cobbler.

Ultimately, as with many drinks, the Brandy Old Fashioned’s appeal is a matter of context. “To me, [this cocktail] conjures up the supper club,” said Wisconsin-based wine importer Rebecca Cecchini, mentioning another of the state’s treasured culinary traditions. “There’s always the Friday night fish fry, and it starts with the Brandy Old Fashioned.”

—Robert Simonson