There is a particular kind of person who orders an Old Fashioned, and a particular kind of bar that can make one. The drink gives nothing away and hides nothing either. It is whiskey, sugar and bitters, stirred over ice and finished with a twist of orange, and that is the entire recipe. No shaker theatre, no egg white, no list of ingredients longer than the drink is tall. Which is exactly why so many of them arrive at the table wrong. The Old Fashioned is the oldest cocktail we have, and the easiest to fumble. Here is how to make one worth the name.

Get it right and it is close to perfect: a slow, amber, grown-up drink that tastes of the spirit you put in it rather than everything you piled on top. Get it wrong and it is a sticky fruit salad swimming in melted ice. The gap between the two is smaller than you think, and it comes down to three decisions: which whiskey, how much sugar, and how you treat the ice. Settle those and the rest looks after itself.

The oldest drink in the book

The Old Fashioned has a decent claim to being the original cocktail, because it more or less is the original definition of one. When the word first appeared in print in 1806, in a New York paper called The Balance and Columbian Repository, a cocktail was defined as a mix of spirits, sugar, water and bitters. Read that back slowly. That is an Old Fashioned, give or take a twist of peel. Everything else we call a cocktail came afterwards.

The name itself is a small act of rebellion. By the late nineteenth century, bartenders had grown fond of elaborate drinks with liqueurs and flourishes, and a certain kind of drinker pushed back, asking for a cocktail made the old-fashioned way: just the spirit, sweetened and seasoned, nothing clever. The story is often pinned on the Pendennis Club in Louisville in the 1880s, though the claim is disputed and probably always will be. What is not in doubt is that the drink survived every fashion thrown at it since, including the long decades when someone decided it should contain muddled orange, a maraschino cherry and a splash of soda. It took Don Draper, sharp suits and the revival of the classic cocktail bar to remind everyone what it was supposed to be.

Bourbon or rye?

This is the first real decision, and there is no wrong answer, only a choice of mood. Rye was the original base, the grain that built American whiskey, and it makes a drier, spicier, more upright Old Fashioned, with a peppery snap that cuts through the sugar. Sazerac Rye is the one to reach for here, distilled in Kentucky and named for a cocktail of its own. Bourbon takes the drink the other way: rounder, sweeter, all vanilla, toffee and warm oak. Buffalo Trace is the sensible, superb default, which is tidy, because Buffalo Trace and Sazerac Rye come from the very same distillery. If you want the drink softer still, a wheated bourbon like W.L. Weller swaps the rye in the mash bill for wheat and gives you something honeyed and almost gentle. None of these will cost a fortune, and all of them have far more to give in a tumbler than under a mixer.

The sugar question

Sweetness is where good intentions go wrong. The classic method uses a sugar cube, saturated with bitters and a splash of water and muddled until it breaks down, which is charming and slightly fiddly. The quicker, more reliable route is a small measure of sugar syrup, which dissolves at once and lets you control the sweetness to the drop. Either way, aim low. A teaspoon of sugar, or five millilitres of syrup, is plenty for a single drink, and you can always add more. As for bitters, Angostura is the house standard: two or three dashes, no more, there to season the drink rather than flavour it. Think of sugar and bitters as salt and pepper, not as the meal.

How to make it

The method rewards patience over flourish. Add your sugar, whether cube or syrup, to the base of a sturdy tumbler. Add two or three dashes of Angostura. Pour in fifty millilitres of bourbon or rye. Drop in one large piece of ice, the bigger the better, because a single large cube melts slowly and dilutes gently, where a handful of small ones waters the drink down before you have finished it. Stir, unhurried, for longer than feels necessary, until the glass is cold and the drink has opened up and softened. Then take a strip of orange peel, give it a firm twist over the surface so the oils spray across the top, rub it round the rim and drop it in. That spritz of citrus oil is the difference between a drink that smells of nothing and one that announces itself before the first sip. A cherry is optional and, if you insist, should be a proper brandied one, never the lurid supermarket kind.

Where it goes wrong

Almost every bad Old Fashioned fails in one of four ways. The first is too much sugar, which turns a spirit-forward drink into pudding, so pour less than you think and correct upward. The second is the fruit salad, that mid-century habit of muddling orange slices and cherries into the glass until the drink tastes of jam, so leave the fruit out and let the peel do the work. The third is small, fast-melting ice, which drowns the whiskey within minutes, so use one big cube or a sphere. The fourth is shaking, which aerates and clouds a drink that is meant to be clear, slow and brooding. Stir it. Always stir it. An Old Fashioned should arrive dark, glassy and a little serious, like a drink that has seen a few things.

Last pour

There is a reason this drink has outlasted every trend thrown at it for more than two centuries. It asks for almost nothing and gives back a great deal: a short, strong, contemplative glass that suits a cold evening and a low light better than almost anything else in the cabinet. Master it and you will never be stuck for something to make at home, and you will quietly judge every bar that gets it wrong. If you enjoy the ritual, the Manhattan is the obvious next step, and there is more on choosing a bourbon when the weather turns. But start here, with the oldest one of all, and build everything else on top.