One of the secrets to making a good old fashioned is to muddle the cherry

One of the secrets to making a good old fashioned is to muddle the cherry, orange and spices together in the glass before even picking up a bottle of spirits or wash.

The tool used for muddling is, appropriately enough called a muddler. It is sort of like a pestle, but longer. The ones you buy at fancy stores often look like the types of miniature baseball bats they give out at minor league stadiums. Muddlers are often made of wood, but really can be made of anything and can be rough or smooth. No doubt you can spend days wading through self-important online arguments about the merits of each material or texture.

In reality, even a standard pestle can work in a pinch provided you have a shallow enough glass. I’ve had luck with wooden spoons and even used the base of another glass.

The tool is less important than the process and the result.

Muddle is a verb that means to bring to a disordered and confusing state. It might seem odd that this act of bringing disorder and confusion is the foundation of a quality cocktail. Then again, you might accurately point out that one of the main purposes of a cocktail is to bring you to a disordered state.

When muddling you, very intentionally, break down the component parts and in the process allow the flavors and textures to merge together into something new. Through the crushing and mashing you free the flavors.

To anyone who has spent time in the kitchen either cooking or baking, the concept is nothing new. Ingredients are broken down and brought together in a 1,000 different combinations and ratios to make something new.

The process goes beyond the bartender’s skill or the chef’s secret techniques for a savory stew, and can be seen in the world around us.

When you mix concrete it is the act of muddling the component ingredients together in specific ratios which results in a substance that lasts thousands of years and serves as the foundations of monuments and civilizations. Conversely if your ratios are off, you get something that will crumble the first time a squirrel sneezes in its general direction.

Most of us, at best, muddle through our lives. We “cope in a more or less satisfactory way despite lack of expertise, planning, or equipment” to use the textbook definition.

We are bombarded with information and tasks throughout our day. Our brains mash and grind this information together and from this paste-like goo we build new ideas and develop solutions to problems.

To muddle through our days and our lives is to react and process and create.

There is a lot to be said for planning ahead and the people who live and die by their daily routines, weekly schedules, monthly calendars planned to the minute and quarterly reviews are often highly successful. They wrap themselves in a blanket of order and stability, secure that they have an idea of what will happen next.

Order is great, until random chance throws a curveball and suddenly your plans and schedules are gone and you are left to muddle through, just like the rest of us.

There is beauty and artistry in watching a bartender muddle the fruit as he builds a cocktail. Just as there is a beauty in watching the ingredients in a kitchen come together or in how piles of lumber and nails come together under the hands of a craftsman to become something greater than the sum of their parts.

Each fall, I spend more hours than I care to think about, quietly watching as elected officials muddle through the budget process with the goal of setting a framework for the coming year to ensure resources go where they are needed with the goal of achieving desired outcomes.

While one might imagine this to be a sterile and scientific process, it has more in common with making an old fashioned than it does with putting a rocket into space.

Most of us spend a good bit of our lives simply muddling through. We might dream of some day when we have it all figured out, get our acts together, and are able to accomplish something great. In this, we muddlers sell ourselves short, not recognizing that often our muddling is the start of something special.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News. Contact Brian at BrianWilson@centralwinews.com.