The Old Fashioned, and why it is on our logo

Before there were cocktails there was the cocktail. In 1806 a New York paper answered a reader's question with a definition: spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters. That is the whole thing. No juice, no liqueur, no shaking. Two hundred and twenty years later it is still the most honest drink on any list.

The name came later. By the 1880s bartenders had started adding absinthe, curaçao and whatever else was on the shelf, and a certain kind of drinker pushed back. They asked for their whiskey cocktail made the old fashioned way. The order stuck, and the Pendennis Club in Louisville has claimed it ever since, though nobody has ever produced the receipt.

What matters to us is not who poured the first one. It is that the drink has survived every fashion since. Sours came and went, the vodka years came and went, and the Old Fashioned sat there in its heavy glass waiting for everyone to come back round. They did.

When we started the company we needed a mark that said what we do without a paragraph underneath it. We tried shakers, coupes and a pair of initials that looked like a law firm. None of them felt like us.

The Old Fashioned did. A rocks glass, one big cube, a cherry and a stirrer. Everything in that glass is a decision. The ice is cut large so it chills without drowning the whisky. The sugar is measured, not dumped. The cherry is a proper one. The stirrer is there because the drink is built in the glass and finished by hand, which is how we like to work.

It is also the first drink the two of us ever argued about. One of us wanted rye and a flamed orange peel. The other wanted bourbon, demerara and nothing set on fire. The badge is the truce. The recipe below is the version that won.

50ml bourbon, something with a bit of weight to it

10ml demerara syrup, two parts sugar to one part water

Three dashes of Angostura bitters

A wide strip of orange peel

One large clear ice cube

Pour the syrup and bitters into a chilled rocks glass and give them a short stir. Add the bourbon and the cube, then stir for twenty to thirty seconds until the outside of the glass is cold to the touch. Squeeze the orange peel over the drink so the oils land on the surface, wipe it round the rim and drop it in. A cherry if you have a good one. No soda, no muddled fruit, no straw.

Make it twice. The first one tells you how your ice behaves. The second one is the drink.