This was one of the first drinks I ever created when I was bartending at Momofuku Ssäm Bar in the late 2000s. Back then, Japanese whisky was much less coveted (and a lot more available) than it is now, and I developed the drink using Yamazaki 12-year single malt. Now, thanks to its sudden rise in popularity, that particular whisky is nearly impossible to find, and prohibitively expensive when found. Fortunately, Japanese whisky producers have been hard at work in the last decade to develop younger, blended whiskies )such as Suntory’s Toki) that are becoming widely available and priced well enough that we can use them in cocktails such as this fairly straightforward Old-Fashioned variation.
When I first tasted Japanese whisky, I was struck by its woody perfume and incense notes. To bring that out in this drink, I infused simple syrup with fennel seeds. Normally, an Old-Fashioned would be made with a straightforward, unflavored sugar syrup like simple syrup or demerara syrup, but here we use the blender (aka my favorite at-home bar tool) for a rapid infusion.
In another departure from the classic recipe, the Mountainside uses only orange bitters. Bitters are an important ingredient in a lot of cocktails because they can provide an impressive amount of aromatic complexity as well as a bitter “backbone” to help give the drink structure. The most common bitter for an Old-Fashioned is Angostura aromatic bitters. With its intense gentian and clove notes, it would be overpowering for this drink, so here we’re just using orange bitters. There are few different producers of orange bitters, but my favorites are Angostura’s or Bitter Truth’s.
Reprinted with permission from Drink What You Want: The Subjective Guide to Making Objectively Delicious Cocktails by John deBary, copyright © 2020. Published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of Penguin Random House. —John deBary
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