How To Make An Adequate Rye Old Fashioned

I go on runs with cocktails. I'm like a child who gets a new toy, obsesses over the toy for a full week, and then wants nothing to do with it. I went through a whole summer of drinking greyhounds and throwing up those greyhounds into the bushes. I drank a lot of rum & Diet Cokes when I was trying to drop weight, which will probably give me anal cancer one day. And now, I am on a run of old fashioneds. My hope is that I've finally landed on the preferred cocktail for the rest of my existence. So that when I walk into a bar, the bartender will be like, "The usual, Archduke Magary?"—in my daydreams, I am an archduke—and then he mixes an old fashioned for me and people are impressed by how classy and manly I am.

Anyway, if you wanna make an old fashioned at home, it's relatively easy and requires no fancy, annoying bar tools of any kind. Here is your ingredient list:

* one sugar cube or half a teaspoon of sugar

* one orange wheel

* one maraschino cherry

* four dashes of Angostura bitters

* a splash of seltzer

* two or more shots of rye whiskey

* one very large ice cube (or two smaller, lamer ice cubes)

I actually use rye whiskey instead of the usual bourbon for this. Bulleit Rye, to be precise. Bulleit Rye is probably made by Coors or something, but fuck me if it isn't delicious. But the crucial part here is the bitters, which are insanely expensive. A small bottle of that shit was, like, 10 bucks at my nearby liquor store. I feel like I'm being taken. You can make your own bitters, but it takes two weeks, and I would just end up chugging the grain alcohol straight anyway.

Anyway, here are your steps:

1. Put the first five ingredients (sugar, orange wheel, maraschino cherry, bitters, and seltzer) into a cocktail glass and mash them all up using the back of a teaspoon. Mash it gently, or else the orange and cherry squirt all over you and you get super pissed. Maraschino-cherry juice is made from eight different kinds of indelible cancer dye.

2. Add the ice cube.

3. Fill the rest of the glass with the rye.

4. Stir it all up.

5. Garnish with half an orange wheel and an extra cherry if you want.

6. Wait a minute or two for the ice to melt a little and get the tussin soakin' in.

7. O U GON DRANK.

That's it. You are now civilized. There are many variations of this recipe, so feel free to post your own in the comments. If you are a cocktail truther who wants to accuse me of not making the drink properly, you can kindly get fucked.

Drew Magary writes for Deadspin. He's also a correspondent for GQ. Follow him on Twitter @drewmagary and email him at drew.deadspin.com. You can also order his book, Someone Could Get Hurt, through his homepage. He also went on Chopped as an amateur and kicked everyone's asses.

Image by Sam Woolley.

Adequate Man is Deadspin's new self-improvement blog, dedicated to making you just good enough at everything. Suggestions for future topics are welcome below.