Old Fashioned values: a cocktail recipe to live by

Take your time. Measure twice. Finish what you start. How will you have time to do it again if you don’t take time to do it right the first time? Work hard at work, then come home. Loosen your tie and relax. Make a highball or mix a cocktail for your wife and yourself. Share the end of the day.

We are brothers and we write here of a drink and the man who taught it to us, our father. Teaching us how to make it, he also taught us something of how to live. He was a chemical engineer, and so the formula was important. The drink was the Old Fashioned (or Old Fashion; it doesn’t matter), and this is how he made it.

You will need: half a teaspoon of sugar, four to six drops of Angostura bitters, half a shot of tap water, the juice of about one-third of an orange (hand-squeezed), and one or two store-brand red maraschino cherries with a short teaspoon of cherry juice.