Review: Traverse City Old Fashioned and Cherry Old Fashioned
Bottled cocktails are inundating the market, and outside of the Margarita, none seems quite as popular to premix as the Old Fashioned. It makes sense: It’s one of few popular cocktails with ingredients that don’t spoil, so it should functionally last forever in the bottle, even after opening.
The next producer to try its hand at the bottled Old Fashioned is Michigan’s Traverse City, which makes some surprisingly good whiskey up north. How do cocktails fare when made in-house? Let’s give these two expressions a try.
Traverse City Old Fashioned Cocktail -Made with 6 year old bourbon from Traverse City, simple syrup, bitters, and “citrus expression.” The package turns out to be totally solid: Sweet but not too sweet, edged with Angostura but not too much, and hearty with oak plus vanilla and caramel notes. I’ve had so many bottled/canned Old Fashioneds that try to mix things up with oddball twists or luxe ingredients and, in the process, fuck the whole thing up. This is not a complex recipe, and while I’m happy to try out a twist that works, the drink needn’t be reinvented every three months. Here, the whiskey does the talking, with bitters and sugar sprinkling in appropriate nuance. Lingering hints of anise, walnut, and cinnamon lift the finish. This is the real deal. Throw a Maraska cherry in the glass, and you’re good to go. 74 proof. A / $30 (375ml)
Traverse City Cherry Old Fashioned Cocktail – Same recipe, except made with Traverse City’s American Cherry Edition, a cherry-flavored NAS bourbon, which is the company’s bestselling whiskey. It’s quite a bit sweeter, lower in abv, and loaded with cherry flavor. The concoction even has a rouge coloration to it. The cherry bursts right away and fades slowly, allowing milk chocolate into the mix — which is plenty complementary but not exactly groundbreaking. As it stands, this doesn’t really present itself as an Old Fashioned but rather like some oddball, whiskey-soaked Cosmopolitan, albeit with the lightest of bitter vibes on the finish. It’s light on its feet and wholly agreeable, but it lacks much in the way of depth. Don’t get me wrong: I’d still drink it, but I greatly prefer the standard edition in this duo. 54 proof. B / $20 (375ml)
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