Lost Spirits: The Old-Fashioned Way

Let’s face it: people were a lot tougher 150 years ago. Back then, a man could lose his leg to the war, his family to a cholera epidemic, and his savings to a robber baron—and still make it to the pub in time for happy hour. Nowadays we declare a minor emergency if retail clerks won’t honor our expired coupons. Accordingly, drinks were quite a bit tougher 150 years ago as well. (None of this Smirnoff Ice nonsense.) Consider, then, the Old Fashioned—one of the earliest cocktails to be called such.

Any bar in America can mix you up a decent Old Fashioned, more or less. Properly made, it tastes like whiskey with a few other strictly decorative flavors and aromas on the side. It was once frequently made with brandy as well, and I dare say it makes a finer drink. Don’t bother ordering one, though, as the bartender will likely murder it. People seem to have a bit of trouble with brandy these days, so allow me a brief brandy-related digression.

Brandy is an aged, distilled spirit made from grape wine, and I dearly hope you already knew that. Folks have been distilling wine for approximately a thousand years now, and some sources will tell you that brandy is nearly as old as distillation itself. At any rate, it was one of the more useful results of man’s quest to extend the longevity of wine, a connection evident in the etymology of the word: “brandy” is an anglicized corruption of the Dutch word brandewijn, which literally means “burnt wine.”

At any rate, brandy was one of the most popular spirituous liquors in the western world before it was unseated by rum and whiskey in the 1700s. Its downward spiral accelerated rapidly in the late 19th century when France, a leading brandy supplier, was devastated by a phylloxera epidemic, which decimated much of the country’s grapevines. The supply of wine and brandy dwindled, and the French migrated to absinthe instead. Meanwhile, way across the big drink, brandy started disappearing from American drinking culture, and whiskey puffed up its chest and took up the slack.

Incidentally, this is why the Old Fashioned is currently, by default, a whiskey cocktail. Nevertheless, the recipe is pre-phylloxera, and thus can also be made with brandy or gin (Holland’s or Old Tom only, not London dry). According to my own preferences, I’ll be focusing on the brandy variant from here on out.

An Old Fashioned is nothing more than a recreation of the original, seminal cocktail, which comprised only a measure of spirits, water, sugar, and bitters. If you want to get technical, you can’t call a drink a cocktail unless it contains those four core elements. Feel free to stretch it a bit—gomme syrup for sugar, ice for water, et cetera. Apparently some folks were getting curmudgeony about the direction in which the cocktail was headed, and wanted to do things the old-fashioned way; namely, a drink containing those four elements listed above, and maybe a little garnish or two. (In the true spirit of the drink, I omit the garnish. Frivolous dandyism, if you ask me.)

Today’s Old Fashioned is largely faithful to the original, at least if you want it with whiskey. But a Brandy Old Fashioned? Good luck, mate. I’m told it’s still popular in the Great Lakes region—Wisconsin in particular—but I live in Michigan, the Great Lakest of all the Great Lakes states, and even here most bars won’t mix you a Brandy Old Fashioned worth tippling. I can’t recall if I’ve ever been to Wisconsin (I suspect that I have not), but having seen the typical Wisconsin recipe, I can tell you that it’s no closer to the original than whatever the hell it is that all these well-meaning Michiganders are serving me.

So if you want to be a pedantic ass like me, you should learn how to mix a proper Brandy Old Fashioned. Start with an old-fashioned glass, and then take a moment to consider that you’re finally using it for its intended purpose. You didn’t honestly think that name was a coincidence, did you?

Next, drop about a teaspoon of sugar into the glass, and then just enough water to dissolve the sugar. Add a few dashes of bitters. Angostura is historically accurate—lucky for us, since it’s the only brand of aromatic bitters widely available in supermarkets—but Peychaud’s will work nicely as well.

For the brandy, try using a modest (and inexpensive) French product like Raynal or St. Remy. To be perfectly honest, it’ll taste just fine with something cheap and domestic like Christian Brothers or Paul Masson, too. Refinement isn’t the point here, even if original recipes called for fine Cognac, which in those days wasn’t nearly as expensive.

Anyway, add a measure of brandy (recipes vary regarding how much—about two, two and a half shots is a good place to start) and some ice cubes, then give it a stir. I don’t put too much stock in proportions for this one. I have a heavy pouring hand and tend to apply a bit of English when doling out the bitters, but it’s no exact science. Feel free to exercise some poetic license. Garnish it if you want, but be careful. I’ve seen bartenders try and cram an entire produce aisle in there, and that misses the point of the drink entirely. Lemon and orange peels are historically acceptable options, but that’s a waste of fruit if you ask me. I might drop in a maraschino cherry if I’m feeling anachronistic and saucy.

Nowadays, some folks like to top it off with a bit of soda water or 7-Up. Don’t do that. If you need your liquor that watered down, this drink isn’t for you. Instead, you might try returning to the 1980s and ordering a wine spritzer.

And there you have it. Nothing simpler.

As you toss back your Old Fashioned, consider those Victorian saloon-goers. Maybe they lived through the Civil War, where they saw the country of their youth torn violently asunder. Not even the drinks are as they remember. Imagine their frustration when, after ordering a cocktail, the bartender serves them something all mucked up with dashes of absinthe, layers of Curaçao, frivolous garnishes, and all manner of newfangled tweaks and fixes.

In this dark age of “hard” cider and wine coolers, of simulacra and bureaucracy, I understand their frustration.

The Peaches of Wrath

Mike Gibson

What Michigan's economy has done to my childhood home...seriously.

Like many Michiganders, I’ll soon be packing my bags and strolling off to greener pastures. I’d rather stick around, rather not uproot myself from my family and home, but Michigan’s dishrag economy has given me little choice in the matter. It’s an epidemic problem, and it’s hitting my generation of twenty-somethings the hardest. Anyone living in an abysmal factory town knows that you can get more mileage out of a college diploma by using it for rolling papers than by using it to actually find a job. Around here, reliable employment is purely mythical, something you might read about in a medieval bestiary in between accounts of manticores and basilisks.

And like most societal problems, this one can be found succinctly expressed on a popular bumper sticker: MICHIGAN: LAST ONE OUT TURN OFF THE LIGHTS. This is typical bumper-sticker hyperbole, of course, because the power companies will certainly bail out of Michigan long before the last of their customers will.

A popular destination for all these Great Lakes expats seems to be Atlanta. I can’t imagine why. I assume most folks simply loaded up the minivan and hit the road Tom Joad-style, cruising arbitrarily south down I-75 until stumbling upon Atlanta entirely by accident. Maybe they just ran out of gas or money and couldn’t make it all the way to Florida.

If you ask someone to describe Atlanta, they’ll likely tell you that it’s pretty big and then change the subject. Not because they’re trying to avoid the topic, mind you, but because that’s really all there is to say. Ever since the Civil War, Atlanta has been continually razing and renewing itself at the expense of any unifying identity. It lacks the je ne sais quoi that gives places like New Orleans and Chicago such character. Drive through downtown and you’ll see dozens of monolithic skyscrapers towering pointlessly over the city, all of them sleek and modern, but not quite sleek and modern enough that you’ll remember the skyline after it disappears from your rearview mirror. Sure is big, though.

One can’t help but get the impression,

I can almost smell the peach cobbler.

when driving through, that Atlanta is just another also-ran metropolis, a city where every park, fountain, statue, and museum were created simply to keep pace with places like Dallas or Phoenix, which suggests a sort of “me too!” approach to urban renewal.

But perhaps I’m being unfair. I find most large cities superficial and frivolous, and their citizens equally so. If you live in such a place (and are still impressed by bright lights and tall things), your life is probably a contest: the nightlife in X-opolis is better than that of Y-opolis, Z-opolis has better-looking women than either, A-opolis has better food, B-opolis has a prettier skyline, and your city is better than all of them. It’s not unlike a group of young boys arguing over who’s oldest, who’s tallest, or who has the most Star Wars action figures, except that we’re expected to outgrow those things. Such posturing is rather ill-tailored for adults, and I can only assume that those who engage in it are trying to rationalize the fact that they pay two-thousand dollars a month to live in an apartment the size of a broom closet. And all these major cities exploit that attitude by pouring millions of dollars into revitalization projects that look good in travel guides but have no redeeming social value.

For all its superficial efforts to keep up, though, Atlanta never tries to convince you of its own greatness. This earnestness, this unpretentiousness, is the city’s crowning irony, and also its chief blessing. As a result, Atlanta is hard to stereotype or pigeonhole. Of course, that’s not to say Atlantans aren’t proud of their city’s history or attractions. Quite the contrary; as soon as you step into town, you’ll be relentlessly hounded by advertising that insists you visit the city’s many tourist spots, including Centennial Olympic Park, the Georgia Aquarium, the World of Coca-Cola, Ted Turner, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta Underground, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. (I understand they also have sports teams, but that may be a rumor.)

Once you’ve exhausted these possibilities, there’s not much else to do stand about and talk. Perhaps it’s this sense of boredom that makes locals so sociable and friendly. Spend enough time there and maybe you won’t even mind the crowds.

I first visited about three years ago. Even though I’d planned my trip well ahead of time, it was still mostly accidental. I came to Atlanta with little money, no hotel reservations, no map, and not much of anything but a change of clothes and a toothbrush. I had to depend entirely on the hospitality and mercy of strangers for food and shelter. In any of Michigan’s violent third-world piss-gutter cities, this would likely have gotten me killed, battered, or worse. 

At any rate, I’d grown rather fond of Atlanta by the time I left. Perhaps not with the city itself—such large metropolises are interchangeable—but with the people. Despite the nightmarish traffic and unthinkable crowds, it’s easy to get sucked into the milieu and feel at home there. Even if the locals call you a “Yankee invader” when your back is turned.

So I’m going to live there, at least until Michigan ceases to be a Steinbeck novel. It’s as good a place as any to ride out this economic storm, and despite its many flaws, it’s still nicer than Detroit. Maybe that should be the city slogan: ATLANTA: IT’S NOT DETROIT. SURE IS BIG, TOO. I think I have an idea for a bumper sticker.

Lost Spirits – Grog

Mike Gibson

My ancestors lived far more interesting lives than I’ll ever hope to. They were lumberjacks, voyageurs, bootleggers, French royalty, Union soldiers, war heroes. In some small way, many of them impressed their mark on history and helped forge this nation. Meanwhile, it’s a Saturday evening and I’m sitting here in my underwear drinking rum, using most of my available effort to prevent the condensation on my glass from falling onto my stomach. Clearly, I’m living the dream.

The only one of these ancestors I’ve ever actually known was my grandfather, a sailor, war veteran, and all-around badass. He joined the United States Navy when he turned eighteen—an age at which I was still struggling to learn how to cook a frozen pizza.

Duly inspired, I frequently find myself diving down a bottle of rum and dreaming about the sea, dreaming of an alternate reality where I can look at a lake freighter without getting violently seasick.

And since a life at sea is obviously not in my future, I eventually settled upon the next closest alternative—grog, the mixed drink that everyone’s heard of yet no one knows how to make.

But before I get to that, a brief historical rundown is in order. The English Navy customarily served rations of French brandy to its sailors while at sea, since fresh water is traditionally hard to find in the oceans, and during the 17th century no one had yet thought to found Aquafina.

At some point during the 1600s, England managed to snatch up a bevy of islands in the Caribbean, and some bloke discovered that sugar cane grew pretty well there. The sugar industry exploded, and in a few years the islands were saddled with molasses, an industrial byproduct that no one had any idea what to do with. Eventually some other bloke thought it would be a fine idea to ferment and distill it, and thus rum was born.

Soon the Royal Navy was serving rum to its sailors instead of French brandy. Remember, of course, that the English and French weren’t exactly good mates at this point in history, and this dietary transition makes perfect sense.

Consider the insurmountable complexities of sailing on an old tall ship. Have a few shots of rum and consider it again. If piloting a sailing ship suddenly seems like a bad idea, the Royal Navy probably would have agreed with you. Eventually they decided to dilute sailors’ daily rum rations with a bit of water.

If this doesn’t sound very potable, those sailors probably would have agreed with you. To compensate, they started mixing in their rations of lime and sugar as well. (A fun fact for all you ethnic slur hobbyists out there—this daily lime ration is why the rest of the world started calling Englishmen “limeys.”) They started calling this concoction “grog,” in honor of one Admiral Vernon, whose nickname was apparently “Old Grogrom.”

More than any other drink, grog has become emblematic of the sailing life, though in the last century it’s been overshadowed in this regard by rum, its primary ingredient. This may be because most bars these days can’t mix a drink that hasn’t featured prominently on Sex and the City.

Bearing that in mind, it looks like you’ll have to make it yourself. And since I suspect you’ll do it wrong, let me offer some advice.

As far as rum goes, you’re going to need something full-bodied and aged. This means no white rum, and no spiced rum. (Captain Morgan and Sailor Jerry can stay below deck for this one.) If you’re shooting for historical accuracy, use Pusser’s Rum—if you can find it. If you can’t, Mount Gay Eclipse will do. I’ll keelhaul you if you try using Bacardi.

As for the sugar, keep in mind that the white, refined variety that we’re used to didn’t come along until the close of the 19th century. Use brown sugar instead. Its slightly richer flavor profile complements the rum much more nicely than does modern superfine sugar, but it’s a lot more difficult to mix into the water. If you’re having problems, just use Splenda. I won’t tell anyone.

And of course you’ll want to use the juice of a real lime, so keep that little plastic lime-shaped bottle in your fridge where it belongs.

Grab an old-fashioned glass and add a couple ounces of water. Mix in a teaspoon of sugar and half an ounce of lime juice, stir vigorously. Add two ounces of rum, stir vigorously. Make the sure the sugar dissolves; otherwise, your drink will be depressingly tart. And although I can’t imagine that 18th century sailors had much access to ice, you’ll likely find this more refreshing on the rocks.

These instructions are all approximate, of course. In the nascent days of the drink, the sailors were likely adjusting the ingredients (sans rum) to taste, and so should you.

My more cocktail-savvy readers are surely remarking that this sounds an awful lot like a rum sour. And maybe it is, but it’s a rum sour with an anchor tattooed on one arm and a hula girl on the other. Make one or two for yourself and you’ll understand. It’s the closest you’ll ever come to having the ocean in a glass short of a dram of seawater.

Drink up, and you’ll be one step closer to understanding what it was like to see the world from the prow of a rickety old schooner, what it was like to be an oceangoing transient who saw whole lunar cycles pass without a glimpse of land, what it was like to have one’s memory of home and family recede from the mind’s eye like an already forgotten harbor town.

I sometimes wonder if that’s what it was like for my grandfather, who, by my age, had seen more of the world than most of us will in our entire lives. I’ll never know, at any rate, so I’ll stick to my grog. I’m feeling a bit seasick anyway.