There is a moment, somewhere around the middle of September, when the drink you reach for quietly changes. The spritz has done its summer service. The evenings have drawn in, the jumper has come out of the drawer, and what you want in your hand is something darker, warmer and a little more serious. This is Manhattan weather. Three ingredients, no shaking, no fuss, and a result that has been making people feel like the most composed person in the room since before your great-grandparents were born.

The Manhattan is whiskey, sweet vermouth and bitters, stirred with ice until it is cold and silky and poured without so much as a splash of anything fizzy. It is the grown-up cousin of the Old Fashioned and the whiskey-drinker's answer to the Martini: spirit-forward, softly sweet, and built entirely on the interplay of two bottles that most people already half-own.

It was born in New York, most likely in the 1870s or 1880s, and the club that shares its name is one of the more plausible birthplaces. The origin story involving Winston Churchill's mother has been quietly retired by people who checked the dates. What matters is that the recipe has barely moved in a century and a half, because it was more or less right the first time.

The whiskey question: rye or bourbon

The classic Manhattan is a rye drink, and there is a good reason for that. Rye brings a dry, peppery snap that cuts through the sweetness of the vermouth and stops the whole thing turning into pudding. If you want the version the old bartenders would recognise, reach for a proper rye. Bulleit Rye, built on a mash that is almost all rye grain, has exactly the kind of spice this drink was designed around.

Bourbon makes a softer, rounder Manhattan, and there is nothing wrong with that. It is sweeter, more vanilla-led, and easier to love if you are new to the drink. Buffalo Trace is the sensible everyday choice: gentle, caramel-rich and endlessly reliable. Elijah Craig Small Batch adds a little more oak and swagger. And if you want the smoothest possible version, W.L. Weller swaps the rye in its mash for wheat, which rounds off every hard edge. None of these is wrong. It simply depends on whether you want the Manhattan to bite back.

The vermouth is not the supporting act

Here is where most home Manhattans go quietly astray. People pour a decent whiskey over a tired, half-oxidised bottle of vermouth that has been sitting in a warm cupboard since the last dinner party, and then wonder why the drink tastes flat. Vermouth is wine. It goes off. Keep it in the fridge once opened and finish it within a month or two.

Get a good one and it does more than half the work. Carpano Antica Formula is the bottle to beat: rich, faintly bitter, full of dried fruit and vanilla and a whisper of cocoa, made to a recipe that traces back to the man who more or less invented vermouth in Turin in 1786. Pour it alongside a good whiskey and the two do not so much mix as shake hands.

The bitters, and why you should not skip them

Two dashes of aromatic bitters is the smallest ingredient in the drink and the one that pulls it all into focus. Skip it and the Manhattan tastes sweet and slightly aimless. Add it and everything sharpens: the spice lifts, the vermouth stops cloying, and the drink gains that faint savoury edge that makes you want the next sip. A bottle of Fee Brothers Old Fashion Aromatic Bitters will last you a year of Manhattans and improve almost every other brown-spirit drink you make along the way.

The build

Fill a mixing glass, or the largest tumbler you own, with plenty of ice. Pour in two parts whiskey to one part sweet vermouth: fifty millilitres of whiskey to twenty-five of vermouth is the classic ratio, and a generous one at that. Add two dashes of aromatic bitters. Stir, do not shake. Shaking bruises the drink and clouds it with tiny shards of ice; a Manhattan should be clear and glossy. Stir for around thirty seconds, until the outside of the glass is cold to the touch and the drink has softened and diluted just enough.

Strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a good cocktail cherry, the dark, boozy kind rather than the fluorescent supermarket sort, and drop it in so it sits at the bottom like a small reward. Some people add a twist of orange peel, squeezed over the top so the oils catch the aroma. Both are correct. Pick your mood.

Three variations worth knowing

The Perfect Manhattan is not a boast about quality: it means splitting the vermouth half-and-half between sweet and dry, for a drier, more balanced drink. The Black Manhattan swaps the vermouth entirely for an Italian amaro, a bottle like Amaro Montenegro, giving you something darker, herbal and faintly medicinal in the best sense. Reach for Scotch instead of American whiskey and you have made a Rob Roy, which is the Manhattan gone to Speyside for the weekend. And if you would rather your whiskey met Campari, that is a Boulevardier. All of them start from the same simple frame. That is rather the point.

None of this takes more than a minute, and once you have made a few you will stop measuring altogether and start pouring by eye and by mood. That is when a cocktail stops being a recipe and starts being a habit. The nights are getting longer, the reasons to make one properly are multiplying, and the whole thing costs you two bottles and thirty seconds of stirring.