Old Fashioned — Its Name Was Already in the Newspaper Before the Club That Claims to Have Invented It Was Born

There are four ingredients. The definition of one of them has barely changed in over two hundred years. Yet the claim of the club that came forward saying “we invented it” stumbles on the very year of its own founding

1. The Story Most Often Told

The most widely told story credits the invention of the Old Fashioned to the Pendennis Club, a gentlemen’s club in Louisville, Kentucky.

The story goes like this: a bartender at the club created the drink for a member who happened to be a bourbon distiller. That distiller then carried the drink to the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and helped it spread from there.

The source is a hotel memoir published in 1931. It reads:

The Old-Fashioned Whiskey Cocktail is said to have been the invention of a bartender at the famous Pendennis Club, of Louisville.

This single sentence is the starting point for the story that’s still told today.

2. Three Holes in the Story

But line this story up on a timeline, and a few holes start to show.

Hole one. The original 1931 source doesn’t name the bartender. Yet the version told today comes with a specific name attached — “Martin Cuneo.” Who added that name, and when, can’t be traced in the record.

Hole two. The original text also gives no date for when this happened. Yet the story told today specifies a period — “between 1889 and 1895.” That, too, is information absent from the original.

Hole three — the most decisive one. The official website of the very distiller’s brand that has championed this story gets the source book’s title and publication year wrong. The correct citation is Old Waldorf Bar Days, published in 1931, but the official site listed a different title and an incorrect year, 1935. The brand making the claim, in other words, couldn’t accurately state the bibliographic details of the very book its claim rests on.

And there’s a contradiction that outweighs all of these. The Pendennis Club was founded in 1881. Yet the term “Old Fashioned cocktail” itself already appears in a newspaper article from February 1880. The name was already in print before the club was born.

Citing this chronological contradiction, at least one spirits historian has said it’s fair to call the anecdote thoroughly debunked. The club, for its part, has since walked the claim back to something narrower: not that it invented the Old Fashioned itself, but that it originated the fruit-garnished variation of it.

3. The Structure Existed Before the Name

Trace the timeline carefully, and something else comes into view: the “structure” of this drink existed long before the name “Old Fashioned” itself did.

“Spirit, sugar, water, and bitters” — the record of a term for this combination goes back to a New York State newspaper in 1806. A reader had written in to ask about a word he’d never heard. That word wasn’t “Old Fashioned” — it was “cocktail.” The editors answered in print, with the following definition:

It is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.

In other words, at this point, the name “Old Fashioned” didn’t exist anywhere yet. What existed was the word “cocktail,” and its four component parts. But those four — spirit, sugar, water, bitters — align almost exactly with the Old Fashioned’s composition today.

Recipes carrying this structure forward are said to have already begun appearing in the record by around 1862. But the name “Old Fashioned” wouldn’t appear in a newspaper until 1880, and it wouldn’t appear as a recipe in a bartenders’ guide until 1888.

In other words, the structure came first, and the name arrived decades later. And the name itself is suggestive. One account holds that the term “Old Fashioned” took hold because customers, faced with the “new” cocktails of the day — heavy on fruit liqueurs and syrups — began ordering theirs made “the old-fashioned way.” If that’s the case, then perhaps no one actually invented the name — it may simply have grown out of the request itself, to keep to the old way of doing things.

4. What If the Base Were a Spirit That Had Spent Eleven Years in the Barrel

Of the four elements, the spirit has always been described as the “base,” with the other three — sugar, bitters, water — cast as supporting roles built around it.

But what if the base itself, over long years in the barrel, had already taken on part of what those supporting roles do?

GOKUJO TSUTSUMI, made by Tsutsumi Shuzo (founded 1878) in Asagiri, Kumamoto Prefecture, is a Kuma shochu spirit aged for over eleven years in oloroso sherry casks and bottled directly from a single cask.

Its color runs from deep amber to something close to dark brown. On the nose, caramel, dried apricot, and raisin rise up. Despite sitting at 40% ABV, its texture stays smooth.

One thing should be stated precisely here. This deep color exceeds the legal limit on coloration allowed for a spirit to be labeled Kuma shochu. Under Japan’s liquor tax law, it’s classified not as Kuma shochu but as a liqueur. In other words: committing to a design that locks a single cask’s character straight into the bottle ended up changing the legal category itself.

Caramel, dried apricot, raisin — these sit remarkably close to the direction of sweetness the Old Fashioned has always asked the “sugar” slot to provide. The barrel, over eleven years, may have already done part of sugar’s job in advance.

5. Toward the Old Fashioned of That Counter

This is as far as we can take it. What comes next belongs to whoever is standing behind the counter.

The following is a framework of considerations for professional bartenders. It is not intended to encourage mixing at home.

Points to Consider

① Does the barrel’s sweetness genuinely overlap with the sugar slot?

The caramel, dried apricot, and raisin in GOKUJO TSUTSUMI’s aroma all come from sherry-cask aging. In the Old Fashioned’s traditional design, sugar (or syrup) is added on top of that, separately. Whether to add sweetness again on top of this base, or to simply let the barrel’s work stand as it is — that isn’t ours to decide.

② Kokuto — another lineage of sweetness.

The kokuto (brown sugar) liqueur built on an awamori base from Okinawa’s Mizuho Shuzo carries molasses, a toasted kind of warmth, and a sweetness reminiscent of dried fruit. Where GOKUJO TSUTSUMI’s sweetness belongs to the sherry lineage (grape-derived), kokuto’s sweetness comes from an entirely different plant — sugarcane. Both point in the same direction, “sweet,” but from different origins. Would stacking them add depth, or would two similar aromas layered together blur the drink’s outline instead? That, too, we’ll leave as a question worth testing.

③ Bitters — a slot that stays open.

As for the bitters essential to an Old Fashioned, BG doesn’t carry any. This is designed around the assumption that you’ll use whatever is already behind your own counter.

④ Water and ice.

Whether to dilute slowly with a single large ice cube, or add a small amount of water before combining the rest — this is one of the oldest points of debate around this drink. We think this, too, is best left to each establishment’s own design.

How to Begin the First Round

Start by confirming whether the barrel’s sweetness alone fills the sugar slot.

Or layer in a small amount of kokuto and see how the sugarcane-derived sweetness works.

Or begin from the bitters already on hand, and build out from there.

Any of these is a valid answer. The moment you choose that first move, it already belongs to that counter.

6. What Was There Before the Name Was Born

Let’s return to the question this article opened with.

In 1806, when a reader asked about a word he’d never heard, the definition the editors gave in reply was: spirit, sugar, water, and bitters. That combination of four, on its own, has barely changed in over two hundred years.

Meanwhile, the claim of the club that came forward saying it invented the name “Old Fashioned” was quietly undone by a word that had already appeared in the newspaper before the club itself was born.

The structure is far older than the name. The name wasn’t anyone’s invention — it grew out of a request to keep to the old way of doing things. That’s as far as anything can be said with certainty about this drink.

7. What Remains Unanswered

In this article, of the four elements, we moved only the base spirit.

For the remaining three — sugar, bitters, water — we’ve done no more than lay out points to consider; we haven’t settled anything ourselves. The size of the ice, the speed of dilution, the choice of bitters — all of it remains open.

Next time, we change direction. This time, the lead role goes not to the spirit itself, but to another supporting player — orange liqueur. We go to check the grounds on which a single French distillery claims to be the “originator of triple sec.” The Sidecar.

We’ll take that up next.