As much as Sours are an entire family, the Whiskey Sour is definitely the Kim Kardashian
of the bunch. It's simple but effective, zingy and refreshing and you
should have an awesome one as part of your cocktail arsenal.
The sour formula is one repeated in hundreds if not thousands of cocktails, so master the
basics and then experiment until your heart's content. You have that basic
cocktail triangle of strong, sweet and sour so if you get those balanced then
you can't go wrong.
So where does the Whiskey Sour come from? The Sour tends
to be thought of by cocktail historians as an individualized version of that
matriarch of all cocktails, The Punch. The Punch definitely deserves its own
episode, but basically it's a combination of base spirit, citrus, sugar
and water, and so you can see how it's the predecessor to basically every
cocktail which doesn't fall into the old-fashioned category. So sours,
Collins', daisies etc. As is the excuse with many cocktails, The Sour was
originally born out of medical necessity. Navies often didn't have access to safe
drinking water and beer would spoil on long journeys so sailors received a
ration of spirits, usually rum. To try and combat scurvy they would mix their
spirits with lime juice and a primitive sour was born. They then took this
concoction to shore with them where it was refined somewhat, and generally the
spirit used there would be whatever was most widely available in the country.
So for instance in England it would be more likely to be gin, and then in America
American whiskey was the go-to. In Jerry Thomas's 1862 'Bartenders Guide' he
includes recipes for brandy, gin and rum sours and whiskey sours started to
appear around the same time. In the 1870s they're mentioned in newspaper articles
in a manner which tends to indicate that they needed no introduction, so Americans
were certainly drinking plenty of them by that point. Egg whites started popping up
around 30 years later, probably to mask the inferior bootleg booze
during Prohibition.
You can use any kind of whiskey for your
Whiskey Sour, but I'm gonna stick with the traditional bourbon. As I discuss in
our Rye versus Bourbon smackdown, you can get the best of both worlds by opting
for a high-rye content bourbon which is why I've gone for Bulleit. This way you
still get a good amount of spice with your smooth and rich base. So this little guy
is a contentious issue. Original Sour recipes did not call for egg white
and purists will argue that the addition of egg white actually makes it
a Boston Sour. Whatever the semantics, I do think that the texture added by the
white is now the thing that people associate most with a sour cocktail.
The egg white gained popularity to round out the jagged edges of inferior whiskey,
but also by some sort of scientific magic makes your drink silky, fuller bodied
and with that signature frothy head. If you prefer your sour tangier or you want
to taste the booze more or if you're vegan, feel free to leave the egg white out.
Bitters are also not necessary but to be honest I think that most cocktails
benefit from the length and complexity that they provide. I use orange bitters
as they are light and floral enough not to mess with the balance of your sour,
and they also don't change the color. So it stays nice and lemony fresh.
To start we'll prepare our twist. So I just take a nice big thick piece of the rind off
and then as always go back and trim off all of the white pith. So we're gonna
use our golden cocktail ratio, so two parts of the strong (the booze), one part
of the sour and half a part of the sweet. In this case I'm gonna go for a full 60
mils of my high rye content bourbon, which also equates to two fluid ounces.
Next we have one part or 30 mils or one fluid ounce of freshly squeezed lemon juice.
Then we have a half a part, or 15 mils of sugar syrup. Obviously egg white's
a little bit hard to measure out, but around 15 mils of your egg white and
two good dashes of your orange bitters. We're gonna dry shake this first, I will go
into this in more detail, but basically don't put any ice in your shaker just
pop your tins together make sure they're nice and tight and give it a good shake.
As you can see this makes your drink nice and fluffy. Then we need to chill
and dilute, so you'd better get some ice in your little part of the shaker.
You don't really need to slam it you just need to make sure that this fits nice
and straight hold it together. And preferably not facing it whoever is
sitting in front of you, and shake as hard as you can.
When your tin gets all nice and frosty that's it cold enough, pop it open, give it a little taste.
Delicious.
Whether or not to serve sour's up, ie, in a coupe or down on the rocks
in a rocks glass is entirely a matter of personal preference. Obviously
if you serve it on ice it is gonna continue to dilute and it will separate
over time, so if you're a slow drinker then maybe 'up' is the right way for you.
Personally my cocktails never seem to last longer than a couple of minutes and
I like the feeling of a nice heavy rocks glass in my hand, so I go for that.
So you want to double strain into a chilled glass with big ice. It is actually quite
important to use a fine strainer in this one otherwise those little chips of ice
will ruin that lovely foam that you've worked so hard on. Give your twist a good squeeze
over the top and that'll also burst any little air bubbles that you
have in your egg white foam. And if you feel a little bit fancy find yourself a
cocktail cherry and you can secure that along with your twist for your garnish.
The Whiskey Sour. So now you know.
If you are using the egg white this is where it
gets controversial. Much like making a meringue that light foam on top of your
drink it comes from breaking down the proteins in the egg white and to do this
it takes a fair amount of elbow grease, but you obviously don't want to end up
shaking your cocktail for so long and so hard that you over dilute it. So some
bright spark came up with what's called the dry shake. So you add all of your
ingredients to the shaker and shake it without ice first to emulsify the egg and
get that nice fluffy texture going, and then you add the ice and shake it again
to chill and dilute. This is the most common technique that I've encountered
while working in bars but there is a third, and probably more scientifically
accurate school of thought, which is the reverse dry shake.
The argument is that adding the ice once you've already emulsified
the egg is just going to break down that nice foam that you've worked so hard to create
so they say that what you should do is shake everything except the whites
on ice first strain it out then add the whites and dry shake. To be perfectly
honest I find out a bit of a f### around in the middle of a really hectic service
and I've never had much of an issue getting a nice foamy head just by
shaking really hard. But obviously this is the place for you to experiment.
There's literally no end to the possible permutations of a recipe so simple as
base spirits, sweet and sour. I've already introduced you to a couple; The Margarita
and The Penicillin. The closest cocktail to the sailors original concoction
is of course The Daiquiri, being rum and lime juice. It's such a simple cocktail
that it's a really good indication of a bartender's ability if they're able to
balance it properly, and it's actually a bit of a handshake shot amongst
bartenders to go into each other's work and have little 'snackeries'. One of my
favourite twists on the Whiskey Sour is called a New York Sour which is
basically the exact same but you layer a little red wine float on top. So not only
does it look really pretty because the wine stays separate from the rest of the drink,
but it also adds a really nice depth of flavor and dryness.
A Delicious Sour uses apple brandy as the base spirit and a peach liqueur as a sweetener
and as you can imagine it really does live up to its name. But you can see there
how much fun you can have experimenting with this style of
cocktail. If you just choose your base spirit and then have a think about what
sweeteners you could use that are going to enhance the flavors that you like in
the spirit. So the penicillin is another really good example because the honey
and ginger syrup brings out those delicious notes in the Scottish whisky.