Old Fashioned

With Jackson Cannon

The Old Fashioned is perhaps the most famous of cocktails since it is considered to be the first drink so named. A cocktail is considered a cocktail if it has four ingredients; a mixture of distilled spirits, sugar, water, and bitters. Over time people have used the term for any type of mixed drink, but this is the real thing. About bitters, common ingredients in bitters include angostura bark, cascarilla, cassia, gentian, orange peel, and quinine. The flavor of both Angostura bitters and Peychaud's Bitters derives primarily from gentian, a bitter herb.

Ingredients

1 teaspoon sugar
2 dashes of aromatic bitters (Angostura bitters & Peychaud's Bitters preferred)
2 ounces of soda water
2 ounces rye whiskey
4 to 5 cubes of ice
1 piece of lemon peel

Instructions

1. To a tall mixing glass, add sugar.
2. Add bitters.
3. Add soda water and stir, working all of the sugar into the soda water. Tip: When bubbles disappear the sugar will probably be completed mixed.
4. Add 2 ounces of rye whiskey.
5. Add ice.
6. Stir with a rotating motion until the ice begins to melt and mix with the other liquids.
7. Pour into a small, suitable glass and enjoy.

Drink recipe courtesy of Jackson Cannon, Eastern Standard, 2009.

Mixologist At one of Boston’s most successful restaurant-bars, a head mixologist plies his craft. Jackson Cannon, 44, is Eastern Standard’s bar manager and one of Boston’s revered senior mixologists. Cannon’s cocktail style is classic, but not conservative, and he views drink making as a tool of hospitality, not as an end in and of itself. Eastern Standard’s success as a hip American bistro is partly due to Cannon’s lengthy cocktail menu which helps appeal to the broad cross-section of diners who might come from nearby Fenway Park, from the adjoining hotel or who are there just for the cocktails. It’s all balanced with top-notch front-of-house service that keeps locals coming back. Cannon is foraying into largely uncharted territory for modern American mixologists: the art of making homemade vermouth. Along with the help of other protégés he’s trained and other vermouth enthusiasts, he’s creating his own recipes and laying the groundwork for one of the next trends in artisanal mixology.