How to make an old fashioned at home?

So for a twist on an Old Fashioned, I would say head to the decent liquor store in your town or down the street from your house and grab some apple brandy and grab a bottle of cognac. And let's just do one ounce of each. Let's get a little bit of apple cider and we're gonna use the cider instead of water to make this simple syrup. So just equal parts there. Then just a little bit of cherry and orange bitters in there. And you've got a Thanksgiving Day in a glass right there.

How to Design a Successful Drink Menu?

Take your time and you want to come at it the right way.

First, you look at some of their the sales reports. Then, you look at Instagram and you start correlating the things that are already working, the flavors that are already working, the types and formats that are already working. This isn't about ripping the rug out from underneath the program. It's about just taking quarter turns on the things that are already doing so well and just elevating them ever so slightly so that you don't leave those guests in the dark just because they don't like Aloe Vera or Tamarin. It's about this quarter turning that recipe and turning the volume up a little. So the customers will be like, “I like the old one, but this one is getting better”. And this is the trust. The trust that you earn from guests so that maybe they will come back in a month or two months and try that crazy cocktail at the bottom of the menu.

The other side of that is looking at things that really don't work, or haven't worked historically. And in offering something new that, again, listening to the neighborhood, you feel is going to be a success or is going to start to tell a story.

How to reinvent a classic cocktail?

In terms of reinventing the classic cocktail, let's just go for the low hanging fruit. Let's talk about old fashioned.

An old fashioned is just a combination of a base spirit, bitters, and sugar.

Obviously it was historically usually made with whiskey. And at a time, when bars were just beginning to have creative menus, people would come back and say, can I have the whiskey cocktail, the old fashioned way? That's when the name was born.

When you look at those building blocks of that cocktail, whiskey, sugar, bitters, and any base spirit, there's a lot of room to play there.

Let's take the bourbon out. Let's put in cognac. Or let's take the bourbon out or the rye out, and let's put in tequila or let's do a split of cognac and rye.

Now for the sugar. It is just a just a vehicle for some richness, some softness of the cocktail. But that sugar is made with water, which is flavorless. It doesn't need to be flavorless. Why don’t we just use tea or put, some fruit in that water, or infuse the sugar with some fruits and peels of various citrus.

So now you've already greatly changed that cocktail to something that's a little close to a fingerprint of flavor that you were going for. But it still scratches the itch of someone who's looking for that old fashioned.

Of course, you can play with the bitters. I mean, we live in a time where I'd be shocked if you could find the flavor that isn't in a bitter right now. I'm sure somebody got a peanut butter bitters out there.