Elder Fashion

Phil Ward gave Death & Co two Old Fashioneds in its first year, and everyone remembers the other one. The Elder Fashion is the quieter trick: gin where the whiskey goes, St-Germain where the sugar goes, orange bitters where the Angostura goes, a grapefruit twist where the orange peel goes. Nothing of the original survives except the shape. It ought to taste like a stunt. It tastes like a drink you order twice — floral on the nose, dry and juniper-bright underneath, and gone before you have worked out why it works.

Ward's Other 2007

Death & Co opened on East Sixth Street at the very end of 2006, and Phil Ward spent its first year taking the Old Fashioned apart. The famous result is the Oaxacan Old Fashioned, which put a tequila-and-mezcal split where the whiskey had been and got copied into every bar in America. The Elder Fashion is the same experiment run the other way: rather than making the template darker and smokier, Ward made it pale, floral, and bright.

Death & Co's own recipe archive and Difford's Guide both date it to 2007, and the ingredients agree: St-Germain did not reach the American bar until Robert Cooper launched it that year, so the drink could not have come much earlier. What the bar's own account adds is the method. Ward coined the term Mr. Potato Head around the time he was building drinks for that first menu — industry shorthand ever since for taking an established recipe and swapping out components to get something familiar but new. The Elder Fashion is that idea at its purest, and one of the earliest cocktails to treat St-Germain as a structural sweetener rather than a splash of perfume.

The Spec

Three ingredients and a twist, stirred. The Death & Co book calls for two ounces of Plymouth gin, half an ounce of St-Germain, and two dashes of orange bitters, stirred and strained over one large cube in a double rocks glass, with a grapefruit twist. That is the build below. It is a four-to-one drink, which is worth stating plainly, because half an ounce of elderflower liqueur is a good deal less sweetness than the eye expects when it reads the word liqueur.

Every element, replaced

Most Old Fashioned variations move one piece. Ward moved all four, which is why this one is worth studying and not only drinking: it demonstrates that the template is a structure rather than a recipe. Spirit, sweetener, bitters, twist — hold the proportions, change the contents entirely, and what you get still behaves like an Old Fashioned. Slow, spirit-forward, aromatic, over one big cube.

Plymouth, specifically

The book names Plymouth and it is not being precious. Plymouth is softer and rounder than a London dry — less pine, more earth, a little sweetness of its own — and it meets the elderflower without the two of them arguing. A juniper-forward London dry does work, and Difford's Guide specs it that way, but you will hear a gap open between the botanicals and the flower. If London dry is what is on the shelf, pull the St-Germain up to three-quarters of an ounce to bridge it; that is the reading Difford's publishes, and it is sweeter for a reason.

The twist is doing real work

Grapefruit, not orange, and not because it photographs better. Expressed grapefruit oil is the bitter, faintly sulphurous counterweight this drink needs; without it the elderflower runs unchecked and the whole thing drifts toward hand soap. Squeeze the peel over the surface, wipe it round the rim, drop it in. Skip the twist and you have not made an Elder Fashion, you have made gin with a sweetener in it.

Bottom Line

This is the drink I hand people who tell me they do not like gin, and the same one I hand people who tell me they only drink whiskey. It disarms both, for opposite reasons. Ward built it by refusing to leave a single element of the original in place, which ought to have produced a novelty and instead produced a modern classic. Change everything, keep the shape. That is the whole lesson, and it took him three ingredients to teach it.

The Old Fashioned Family