The Old Fashioned isn't trendy. That's the whole point.
The story most bartenders tell traces back to the Pendennis Club in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1880s — bourbon aristocracy asking for a cocktail “made the old fashioned way,” before the elaborate, syrup-heavy drinks that were trendy at the time. Bourbon icon Colonel James E. Pepper is credited with carrying the recipe from Louisville to New York's Waldorf-Astoria, where it caught on and spread to bars across the country. The drink shows up in print by 1895, in George Kappeler's Modern American Drinks — and it's been on back bars ever since. (Drinks history being what it is, versions of the cocktail predate the Pendennis Club too. Nobody owns “old fashioned way of making a drink.”)
Here's why it lasted when hundreds of other cocktails didn't: it's simple. Spirit, sugar, bitters, citrus. No shaker, no triple sec, no six-ingredient syrup. Just good bourbon or rye, treated with respect.
Combine the sugar and bitters in a rocks glass, add and stir until the sugar mostly dissolves. Add a large ice cube, pour in the bourbon, stir again, and finish with an orange peel — twisted over the glass to release the oils. That's it. That's the whole drink.
The catch: doing it properly requires a mixing glass, bitters you probably don't own, an orange, and roughly a decade of bartending muscle memory to get the ratios right every time.
Why Hail M Is the Proper Solution
“I fly a lot for work and specialty drinks are kind of hard to get, so I usually get a Woodford on the rocks. With this kit, I can carry it on and get that Woodford and make an Old Fashioned! Awesome idea and it tastes great!” — Arthur Wallace
Dressing for Unpredictable Weather
We didn't reinvent the Old Fashioned — we made the real one easier to get right, anywhere.
The Hail M Classic Old Fashioned Infusion Kit is a pyramid cocktail infusion kit filled with real orange peel, bitters-soaked botanicals, and a demerara sugar cube — the exact components of the classic recipe above, portioned correctly, every time. Drop one bag into 2 oz of bourbon or rye, give it a few minutes to do its work, add ice, and stir. No mixing glass, no bitters bottle, no guessing whether you added too much sugar.
It's also the reason the kit has picked up an International SIP Gold Medal Award for Taste 3x PR%F Gold Medals — for Taste, Design, and Innovation. That's not a brand-wide claim; it's specific to this kit, and it's earned by using real ingredients instead of extracts or flavoring.
Mary, Hail M's founder, built the first version of this kit out of a very specific frustration: flying LA–NYC constantly and wanting a proper Old Fashioned on the way home. No orange. No bitters. No cherry. Just a tiny bottle of bourbon and nothing to make it into an actual cocktail. So she put the classic recipe into a tea bag.
Bourbon lovers who've tried it agree it holds up.
One note from experience: don't rush it. The longer the bag sits in your glass, the more flavor it pulls from the bitters and orange — reviewers who let it go a little longer than the minimum consistently report a better drink.
Whether you're stocking a home bar cart, packing for a flight, or putting together a gift for the bourbon person in your life, the Classic kit gets you the same drink that's been ordered at bars for 140 years — without needing to own a bar.
