Walk into Louisville’s Pendennis Club and someone will mention it within five minutes: you’re standing in the birthplace of the Old Fashioned. The story goes that sometime in the 1890s, a bartender named Martin Cuneo mixed whiskey, sugar, bitters, and water for a bourbon baron named Colonel James E. Pepper, who liked it so much he carried the recipe to New York and made it famous. It’s a great story. It is also, according to the historians who checked, almost certainly not true.
Table of Contents
The problem isn’t the drink. Whiskey, sugar, bitters, and water really is one of the oldest combinations in American bar history. The problem is the calendar. By the time Colonel Pepper supposedly tasted his ‘new’ drink at the Pendennis Club, newspapers had already been writing about ‘old fashioned cocktails’ for the better part of a decade — and the club itself hadn’t opened yet when the phrase first showed up in print.
Quick answer
No — cocktail historians, most prominently David Wondrich, have traced the term ‘old fashioned cocktail’ to a Chicago newspaper in February 1880, a full year before the Pendennis Club was founded in 1881. The underlying recipe is even older, tied to a definition of ‘cocktail’ printed in 1806. The club didn’t invent the Old Fashioned; it inherited a flattering story about it decades later.
A clubhouse built for bourbon and bragging rights
The Pendennis Club held its first organizing meeting on June 28, 1881, in Louisville’s city hall — a private refuge for the city’s merchants, lawyers, and bourbon men. James E. Pepper, heir to a distilling family and a self-styled ‘Kentucky Colonel,’ didn’t actually join until 1893, more than a decade after the club opened. Club lore holds that bartender Martin Cuneo invented the drink specifically for Pepper sometime between 1889 and 1895, and that Pepper then carried the recipe to New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, where it supposedly picked up its name and its fame.
That version of events didn’t appear in print until 1931, when Albert Stevens Crockett — a former newspaperman who wrote nostalgic books about the old Waldorf-Astoria bar — repeated it as hotel lore in his book Old Waldorf Bar Days. Pepper had died back in 1906, twenty-five years earlier, so he never got the chance to confirm or deny any of it. Martin Cuneo, the bartender the club credits with inventing the drink, was actually still alive in Louisville at the time — he lived until 1943 — but no public record shows him ever weighing in on Crockett’s version of events, one way or the other.
The timeline that breaks the story
The word ‘cocktail’ got its first printed definition in 1806, in a Hudson, New York paper called The Balance and Columbian Repository, which described it as a drink of ‘spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters’ — essentially the Old Fashioned’s exact recipe, eight decades before anyone at the Pendennis Club allegedly built one.
David Wondrich dug up something even more damning: the Chicago Daily Tribune was already writing about ‘old fashioned cocktails’ in February 1880, a year before the Pendennis Club held its first meeting. As Wondrich put it, ‘Since the Chicago Daily Tribune was already discussing old fashioned cocktails in February of 1880 and the Pendennis Club wasn’t founded until 1881, I think it’s safe to pronounce this myth busted.’ A Chicago bartender named Theodore Proulx published what’s considered the earliest known printed recipe under that name in 1888 — still before Pepper is said to have tasted his famous glass in Louisville.
Even the club’s own paper trail works against it. Jacques Straub, who managed the Pendennis Club’s bar for roughly two decades, published a cocktail book called Drinks in 1914. It includes an Old Fashioned recipe — and never once mentions his own club inventing it. If the Pendennis really was the drink’s birthplace, the man running its bar for twenty years seems like exactly the person who’d have said so.
The part most people miss
The real history isn’t about invention at all — it’s about nostalgia. By the 1860s, bartenders were piling cocktails with liqueurs, absinthe rinses, and fruit syrups. Some drinkers missed the plain original: just spirits, sugar, bitters, and water, built the way bartenders had built it since the early 1800s. When those drinkers asked for a cocktail ‘the old-fashioned way,’ bartenders started calling it exactly that. The name wasn’t a brand for something new; it was a request to go backward. The Pendennis Club didn’t invent the Old Fashioned — it told a better story about it decades after everyone else had already named it, and a Waldorf-Astoria publicist decided that story was good enough to print, with the one man who could have fact-checked it still tending bar in Louisville and apparently never asked.
Sources
This tale draws on Wikipedia’s entry for the Old Fashioned cocktail, which documents the 1806 Balance and Columbian Repository definition and the 1880 Chicago Daily Tribune citation along with David Wondrich’s research; the Wikipedia entry for the Pendennis Club, covering its 1881 founding and James E. Pepper’s 1893 membership and 1906 death; and Difford’s Guide, whose cocktail historians detail the Martin Cuneo legend, Jacques Straub’s 1914 book Drinks, and the club’s unsupported internal paper on the subject.
Explore more: more food lore like this.
Old Fashioned FAQs
Did the Pendennis Club invent the Old Fashioned cocktail?
No. The term ‘old fashioned cocktail’ appeared in print in 1880, a year before the club was founded, and the underlying recipe dates back to at least 1806.
Who really invented the Old Fashioned?
No single person. It evolved as bartenders and drinkers in the mid-1800s began asking for cocktails made ‘the old-fashioned way’ — plain spirits, sugar, bitters, and water — as fancier cocktail styles took over bars.
Who was Colonel James E. Pepper?
A Kentucky bourbon distiller and Pendennis Club member (he joined in 1893) credited by club legend, though not solid evidence, with carrying the Old Fashioned to New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. He died in 1906.
What’s the earliest documented mention of the ‘old fashioned cocktail’?
A February 1880 Chicago Daily Tribune reference, with the earliest known published recipe under that name appearing in 1888 from Chicago bartender Theodore Proulx.
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Photo: Erich Wagner (www.eventografie.de) / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
