Quote Originally Posted by vaticanplum View Post
Hilariously, of all the bourbon/rye cocktails, the Old Fashioned is the one that I would say I've always heard is definitely a rye drink I guess it depends on which bartender you talk to. And the song "Make It Another Old-Fashioned Please" references rye so I always have that in my head.

I also grew up being told that you're never supposed to drink whiskey or bourbon totally straight. They dry out as they age, so you're supposed to add just a splash of water to release the flavor. However, I order whiskey this way all the time and most of the time the bartender misunderstands and gives it to me on the rocks or neat, so this may be an obscure/untrue thing as well. Really I know very little about whiskey, just that I like it. I'm not very discerning.
I'm going strictly on origin when I say it's made with bourbon. It was invented in Louisville by (or in honor or) a bourbon lover:

http://gardenandgun.com/article/old-fashioned

Cocktail lore traces the old-fashioned to late-nineteenth-century Louisville, specifically the Pendennis Club, where the drink was purportedly invented by (or perhaps in honor of) Col. James E. Pepper, a patriarch of Kentucky bourbon whiskey who also kept a successful stable of Thoroughbreds.