bourbon tagged posts

When I think if America I think of Cowboys. I know America is so much more than just cowboys, but the cowboys are the poster boys of America. Maybe it is the cigaret commercials, maybe it is because of the hundreds of cowboy movies, maybe it is the iconic cowboy hat. As kid a used to imagine the cowboys not as the people that manage herds of cattle, but as people that were roaming the country looking for a saloon to get some whiskey and if possible pick up some trouble, pick up a gun fight and even steal a kiss. Yeah. To my childish eyes that was what a cowboy was. A guy with tough looks, soul piercing eyes, rough hands and the smell of smoke, gunpowder and whiskey follow him around. So this cocktail is just a tribute to my childhood heroes.

The first known definition of the word “cocktail” was in response to a reader’s letter asking to define the word in the May 6, 1806 issue of The Balance and Columbia Repository in Hudson, New York. In the May 13, 1806 issue, the paper’s editor wrote that it was a potent concoction of spirits, bitters, water, and sugar. The first use of the specific name “Old Fashioned” was for a Bourbon whiskey cocktail in the 1880s, at the Pendennis Club, a gentlemen’s club in Louisville, Kentucky. The recipe is said to have been invented by a bartender at that club, and popularized by a club member and bourbon distiller, Colonel James E. Pepper, who brought it to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel bar in New York City. The Pepper family distillery is now known as Labrot & Graham.

There is great contention on the proper ...