The Old Beanut: Why It Took Us a Year to Put Our an Old Fashioned on the Menu

The old fashioned is my favourite cocktail. It is Panos's favourite too. We agree on very little when it comes to what should go on the Nectar menu, which is why the drinks programme is as good as it is, but on this we have always been aligned. The old fashioned is the drink that, when everything else has been considered and ordered and discussed, is the one we both end up coming back to.

Which makes it slightly embarrassing that it took us a year to put one on the menu.

Not for lack of trying. We ran an Old Fashioned Month in the first weeks after opening, where we developed four different versions of the drink and offered them as a rotating special. One of those we still recommend to guests when they ask what they should order, which is the informal test of whether something deserves to be on a menu permanently. But a permanent signature old fashioned, something that was ours in the way that the Tzatziki Martini or the Warmth Within are ours, never quite materialised.

The question kept coming up. Guests who had been in a few times would notice the gap. People who knew us well enough to know what we drink would ask directly. We knew we wanted to do it. We just had not found the version worth committing to.

Then someone said old fashioned, banana, peanut butter, and we named the cocktail before we had figured out how to make it.

What an old fashioned actually is

Before explaining what we did to it, the old fashioned deserves a proper introduction, because it is one of the most misunderstood drinks in the world despite being one of the most ordered.

The old fashioned is not a variation on a theme. It is the template from which almost every spirit-forward cocktail that followed it was derived. Its history goes back to the early nineteenth century, making it one of the oldest documented cocktails in existence. The name came later: as bartending became more elaborate through the 1870s and 1880s, with increasingly complex recipes involving multiple liqueurs and garnishes, a contingent of drinkers began requesting their cocktail the old-fashioned way. Spirit, sugar, bitters, water. Nothing else. The name that stuck was simply a description of what they were asking for.

The structure of the old fashioned is deceptively simple. A sugar cube or simple syrup provides sweetness and body. Bitters provides the aromatic complexity and the slight medicinal edge that keeps the drink from being purely sweet. Water, introduced through ice dilution as the drink is stirred, opens the spirit and integrates everything together. And the spirit itself provides everything else: the warmth, the depth, the character that the other three components exist to frame rather than compete with.

This simplicity is precisely what makes the old fashioned so demanding. There is nowhere to hide. The quality of the bourbon is fully exposed. The balance between sweet, bitter, and spirit has to be exact. The dilution has to be precisely managed through the stirring process. Do it wrong and the drink is flat. Do it right and it is one of the most satisfying things a glass can contain.

It is also the reason that bartenders, when asked what their favourite drink is, give the old fashioned as their answer more often than almost any other. It tells you most directly what someone understands about balance and about spirit. And it is the drink that, for Panos and me, never stops being the right answer when the evening is winding down and the conversation is worth extending.

The problem with doing an old fashioned as a signature

Making an old fashioned properly is not the challenge. Making an old fashioned that is interesting enough to sit permanently on a menu alongside the Tzatziki Martini, the Local Connection, and the Bees Essence is considerably harder.

The old fashioned has been riffed on extensively. Smoked old fashioneds. Coffee old fashioneds. Clarified old fashioneds. Barrel-aged old fashioneds. The format is so versatile and so well understood that finding a version that adds something genuinely new to the conversation rather than simply adding an ingredient requires either a very good idea or a very good technique or, ideally, both.

During Old Fashioned Month we found four approaches that worked. The one we still recommend is evidence that the format rewards exploration. But none of those four felt like the permanent version. They were good renditions of an existing idea rather than something that could only have come from Nectar specifically.

The permanent version needed the same quality that the Tzatziki Martini has: a concept that is immediately understandable once explained, completely unexpected before you try it, and impossible to replicate without the specific combination of thinking and technique that produced it.

The name arrived before the technique, and the name is what unlocked everything.

Old Beanut

Old fashioned. Banana. Peanut butter.

Old Beanut.

The name came first, in the way that the best ideas sometimes arrive fully formed before the work of making them real has begun. The concept was immediately obvious: peanut butter and banana are one of the most instinctively correct flavour combinations in existence, and both have a richness and depth that should sit naturally alongside bourbon. The question was how to get them into a drink without making something thick, cloying, or so dominated by the flavour concept that the old fashioned structure underneath it collapsed.

This is where the technique answered the question the concept had raised. And the answer was not fat washing.

Why we used densing and not fat washing

Fat washing was the obvious first thought. It is the technique we use in the Bees Essence to permanently infuse butter into Woodford Reserve, and it produces a deep, rich transfer of flavour from the fat into the spirit. For the Bees Essence, that depth is the point: the butter wash gives the bourbon a rounded, dairy richness that extends the finish and adds a dimension the unmodified spirit does not have.

But fat washing peanut butter into bourbon would produce something too intense for what the Old Beanut is trying to be. Peanut butter is a powerful ingredient. Its flavour is dominant, persistent, and recognisable from the first encounter. Fat-washed into a bourbon, it would announce itself immediately and loudly, turning what should be an old fashioned with an interesting character into a peanut butter cocktail that happens to contain bourbon. The format would not survive the flavour.

We needed a technique that would carry the peanut butter into the spirit more gently, integrating it at a depth that enriches the bourbon without overwhelming it. Something present but not loud. Tasted rather than declared.

The answer was densing, the technique developed by Iain McPherson at Panda and Sons on Queen Street, which we wrote about in detail when we first started experimenting with it. We also use it in the Local Connection, where Mediterranean olive oil is densed into the white negroni build, and the results there taught us something important about what the technique does at lower concentrations: it integrates flavour rather than imposing it.

Densing uses a vacuum blender to create a stable emulsion between fat and liquid at elevated temperature, producing an integration that holds permanently without separation. Where fat washing sits the fat and spirit together and allows migration over time before removing the physical fat, densing forces a more immediate and more controlled integration through the mechanics of the vacuum blending process itself. The degree of flavour transfer can be modulated by adjusting the concentration of fat used, the temperature, and the blending cycle.

For the Old Beanut, we dense peanut butter into Woodford Reserve at a concentration that produces integration rather than domination. The peanut butter is fully present inside the bourbon, but it sits beneath the surface rather than on top of it. The bourbon tastes like itself, but richer, deeper, and with a nutty warmth that you register without immediately being able to name. It is only when you know what is in the glass that you understand what you are tasting, which is precisely the experience we were looking for.

The banana syrup

The banana arrives through the syrup, made in-house at Nectar from real bananas rather than a commercial flavouring.

This matters because commercial banana syrups tend to taste of artificial banana, the kind that shows up in banana-flavoured sweets and bears only a passing resemblance to actual ripe fruit. Making the syrup from real bananas at the right stage of ripeness produces something that tastes like the fruit itself: warm, naturally sweet, slightly caramelised at the edges, with the softness and depth that a ripe banana has when it is exactly right.

In the Old Beanut, the banana syrup plays the role that simple syrup plays in a classic old fashioned: it provides the sweetness and the body. But it does both of those things while contributing its own flavour, which is where the peanut butter and banana combination comes fully into play.

The densed peanut butter and the banana syrup interact inside the glass in the way the two ingredients interact on a plate: each one making the other taste more like itself. The nuttiness amplifies the natural sweetness of the banana. The banana softens and rounds the nuttiness of the peanut butter. The combination produces a third quality that neither ingredient achieves alone, a richness that is warm and familiar and slightly indulgent without ever being heavy.

This is the quality that the first guest described when they tasted it: the way the flavours arrive in sequence and then circle back. The bourbon first. Then the sweetness. Then the banana coming through. Then the nuttiness of the densed peanut butter settling in underneath it all. As the black walnut bitters extend the finish, the whole thing repeats itself quietly, the bourbon returning as the other flavours begin to fade.

Black walnut bitters

The bitters in an old fashioned are where the aromatic complexity lives, and the right choice for the Old Beanut required finding something that could sit across the densed peanut butter bourbon and the banana syrup without either getting lost or competing.

Standard Angostura bitters was considered and rejected. Its profile, which runs toward cinnamon, clove, and dried fruit, is the right choice for a classic old fashioned but slightly too broad for what the Old Beanut is doing. The drink needed something darker and more earthy.

Black walnut bitters is the answer. It carries a deep, slightly tannic nuttiness that echoes the peanut butter character in the densed bourbon without duplicating it. Walnut and peanut speak to each other across the same flavour register: both roasted, both carrying a darkness that sits naturally in a spirit-forward drink, both contributing to the finish in a way that extends rather than interrupts. The black walnut bitters also adds a bitterness that is more savoury and less medicinal than Angostura, which suits the overall character of a drink that is already complex and does not need to be sharpened further.

The three components work together in a way that feels inevitable once you understand them. The densed peanut butter bourbon provides the base and the subtle nutty depth. The banana syrup provides the sweetness and the fruit. The black walnut bitters ties both together and sends the finish in a direction that keeps going long after the glass is empty.

How it drinks

The Old Beanut is described on the menu as strong, nutty, and forward, which is accurate. It is served over a single large ice cube in a rocks glass, stirred to the right dilution, with no garnish competing with what is in the glass.

The subtlety is the thing people notice first. It does not taste the way you expect a peanut butter cocktail to taste, which is because it is not a peanut butter cocktail. It is an old fashioned that happens to carry the depth and character of peanut butter inside the bourbon, present in every sip but never shouting. The banana is warmer and more natural than the name might suggest. The black walnut bitters extends everything into a finish that is genuinely long, the densed peanut butter contributing to that length in the specific way that fat-integrated spirits contribute to finishes: still present on the palate after the liquid has gone.

What the guest said after the first sip is the best description of it. Whisky first. Then sweetness. Then something they could not quite place but felt immediately familiar. As the spice of the bitters fades, the other flavours return. The bourbon warmth comes back. The nuttiness settles underneath it. The banana lingers.

It keeps going. That is the whole point.

The name we had before the cocktail

There is something I find genuinely funny about the fact that the Old Beanut existed as a name for months before it existed as a drink.

Naming a cocktail is usually the last step in the process: you build the drink, you refine it, you decide what it is, and then you find the words for it. The Old Beanut went in the opposite direction. The name arrived in a conversation, fully formed and immediately right, and then the technique and the recipe had to be developed to justify it.

Old fashioned. Banana. Peanut butter. Old Beanut.

It was always going to be that. The only question was whether we could make something deserving of the name, and the answer was densing: the technique that allowed peanut butter to enter a bourbon and change it gently rather than completely, producing something subtle and lingering rather than intense and immediate.

Panos and I have been ordering old fashioneds for as long as either of us has been drinking properly. It took us a year to put one on the menu because we were waiting for the version that was worth the wait.

This is it.

Book a table at Nectar Bar and order the Old Beanut. Preferably at the end of the evening, when the conversation has earned it.

Opening hours Tuesday to Thursday: 5pm to 11pm Friday: 5pm to 1am Saturday: 12pm to 1am Sunday: 12pm to 11pm Monday: Closed