It's May 1806. In Hudson, New York, a newspaper has printed a losing candidate's account of what he spent on drink getting himself not elected. One of the many items on the list is a cocktail, and a reader dutifully writes in to ask what on earth one of those is.
On the thirteenth the editor answers him. As far as anyone can tell, what he wrote is the first time the word cocktail was ever explained in print.
Cock-tail, then, is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.
He added below it that this was "vulgarly called a bittered sling", which is a better name, and a shame it didn't stick.
Four things:
- Spirit
- Sugar
- Water
- Bitters
That's the oldest recipe we have, and it's barely a recipe at all. More a set of instructions for what a drink is supposed to do.
It's worth reading his description again, because three things in it are worth more than any description of a cocktail you're ever going to hear anywhere.
Any kind. Right at the beginning, before anybody had rules about this, or had written their own definitive cocktail recipe book, or wanted a giant debate about gin versus vodka in a Martini, the whole category was built to take whatever spirit you happened to own. Whatever was on the shelf. Whisky was never the point.
Water. Not ice, not a mixer. Water, an ingredient sitting alongside the sugar and the bitters. In 1806 that meant lukewarm water out of a jug, because ice in a drink was still a rich man's trick and a generation or two at least from being everyday. Somebody two hundred and twenty years ago already knew that a spirit needs a little water to open up and say what it has to say, and thought it important enough to write into the definition of the whole category.
Bitters. The fourth word, and the one everybody skips. People taste cardamom and vanilla in ours and ask what we put in. We don't put either of them in. They come out of the bitters. It is doing far more work than anyone gives it credit for.
The name came along a lot later, and it was born of a complaint. By the 1880s bartenders were already clever. They already had waistcoats, and the drinks had liqueurs and fruit and all kinds of ideas in them. If you didn't want any of that, you had to ask for yours the old fashioned way. Eventually people stopped explaining and just said the last three words. The most famous drink in the world is named after somebody ordering off menu.
We make ours with Bajan rum instead of whisky, which the 1806 definition allows and encourages, really, with demerara sugar, bitters, and weeks of sitting still.
Serve it over one large piece of ice with a wide strip of lime peel. The ice isn't only there for the cold. In this drink it's doing the third job on the list, the one they used to fetch in a jug.
The politician lost, and we don't remember their name. The word survived. And the Rum Old Fashioned is one of the drinks now in the new 500ml bottle.
This went out as our weekly letter on Tuesday 1 September 2026. We write one every Tuesday: history, craft, and the last metre. Straight up.
