"The Old-Fashioned" Turns Nine

How My First Cocktail Book Came to Be, and Kicked Off a Literary Genre.

Photographer Daniel Krieger photographing bartender Damon Boelte making an Old-Fashioned at Prime Meats in 2013.

By 2012, I had been writing about cocktails for six years, three of them for the New York Times. But I had no books about cocktails to my credit. Because I knew—like all writers do—that books, not ephemeral free-lance articles, ultimately forge a journalist’s reputation, I was keen to get my first cocktail title under my belt. And I had an idea.

A few years earlier, I had been sitting at the bar at Prime Meats in Brooklyn, nursing one of their house Old-Fashioneds (made with house pear bitters), when it occurred to me that I had been seeing the old cocktail on new cocktail menus a lot lately. This ur-cocktail, once held in disdain by young mixologists and drinkers, was back. I pitched the idea to the Times’ Food editor—whom I had been pitching for two years, without success—and he bit. The article appeared on June 2, 2009.

I didn’t want to stop there. I knew there was a book in the subject. The Old-Fashioned was one of the oldest classic cocktails on record, and is arguably the model for the original cocktail as that genre of drink was known in the early 1800s; and yet no one had ever devoted a book to the subject, a topic as American in its way as baseball, jazz and apple pie. This state of affairs seemed wrong. I knew the new thirst for the Old-Fashioned was only going to grow. Those drinkers would eventually go looking for a book about their favorite drink. I wanted to be the author of that book.

The cover of The Old-Fashioned, shot in Maison Premiere.

There was a problem. I had no one to take this idea to. I had written four books about the theater. But I had no connections in the food and drink publishing world.