Old Fashioned

If there were a First Earl and Countess of Grantham of cocktails, this would be it. The drink is an evolution of the sling, one of the earliest cocktails that simply combined spirits with water and sweetener. Adding bitters made it what today we know as an old fashioned. In the nineteenth century it was known as a bittered sling; calling it an old fashioned came later, when the drink was, by that time, old-fashioned.