Dmitriy Shteynbuk — Why Wisconsin Puts Brandy in Its Old Fashioned
The whiskey Old Fashioned is the national default. In Wisconsin, it isn't. The story starts at the 1893 World's Fair.
Order an Old Fashioned at a bar anywhere in the United States and you will receive a whiskey drink — bourbon or rye, muddled sugar, bitters, orange peel, cherry. Order the same drink in Wisconsin and, unless you specify otherwise, it will arrive made with brandy.
The habit is not a whim and it is not local eccentricity. It has a specific historical starting point: the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
The German-American population of the Upper Midwest was one of the largest ethnic blocs in the country. When Christian Brothers brandy — a California distillery run by a Catholic teaching order — took over the exposition's brandy contract, Wisconsin's German drinkers discovered a fruit-forward, softer spirit that suited the way they already drank. The state took to it in a way no other state did, and Korbel — which absorbed the account after Prohibition — has spent the last century supplying roughly half of its total production to Wisconsin alone.
The Wisconsin Old Fashioned that grew out of this is a distinct drink. Muddled sugar cube, Angostura and orange bitters, an orange slice and a maraschino cherry muddled in with the sugar, brandy poured over, then soda water or lemon-lime soda on top. 'Sweet,' 'sour,' or 'press' — the three modifiers — decide which soda goes in.
It is not what a New York bartender would recognize as an Old Fashioned, but it is what Wisconsin has been drinking for a hundred and thirty years, and the state can make a strong argument that its version is the more historically stable one. The whiskey Old Fashioned kept evolving through the 20th century. The Wisconsin Brandy Old Fashioned mostly did not.