With little else to predate it, save an Atholl Brose, the Old Fashioned is one of the few primordial mixed drinks and fits snugly inside our very first definition of the word cocktail, handed down by The Balance & Columbian Repository’s editor Harry Croswell in 1806, who described it as “composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters...”

Stories abound of the Old Fashioned’s creation, with claimants lining up to be dubbed the genius who first poured whiskey over ice and added a little sugar and bitters. Loudest of these is Louisville’s Pendennis Club, but don’t believe it. Every claim ever staked can be debunked by an earlier reference, a story that doesn’t quite add up or a similar drink found at the same time in a different spot. The origin story is an evolution rather than an invention.

Originally called a Whiskey Cocktail, this drink was served up and considered an ‘eye-opener’ for those pre-breakfast glugs of booze so popular in the 1800s. But a lifetime of mixing spirit with water left the bartenders of the 1870s itching to experiment and into the Whiskey Cocktail they started to throw dashes of absinthe, curaçao and maraschino – anything new and readily available. The result was a cry shouted across many bars in America for “an old-fashioned Whiskey Cocktail” left unadulterated.

Keeping it pure didn’t last long, however, as orange wedges, cherries and even pineapple chunks found themselves muddled in, possibly as a way to disguise foul-tasting homemade liquor. By the end of Prohibition, and found in the deluge of American cocktail books published in the 1930s, smashed fruit was firmly a part of the American recipe.

In the States the now altered Old Fashioned continued in popularity, often served with a spritz of soda water as well, until the 1970s when it all but disappeared, save from the Midwest, whose affiliation with the drink kept it alive.

That was America though. In the UK, and especially London, the Old Fashioned took a different turn, one which stayed true to its original recipe and turned it into a piece of theatre, minus the fruit salad. A theatre, by the way, that still confuses the hell out of a visiting American.

The sharp disparity between British and American Old Fashioneds was apparently discovered in 2002 by Dale DeGroff who, on a trip to London, found the bartending habit of adding in a third of the whiskey and ice at a time to control dilution confounding. This five to six minute ritual was, in his opinion, and in many others’ since, wasteful. “As an Old Fashioned drinker, I’d much rather have the dilution occur while I’m drinking it and taking sips, not at the bar. I want it to get better on my watch, not yours,” DeGroff is quoted as saying by Robert Simonson, journalist and author of The Old-Fashioned: The Story of the World's First Classic Cocktail.