I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do for this post. Usually, I try and alternate between tastings and cocktails and I think when the Missus was out and about at Target, I was pondering making this about pisco sours, but I took a leap in a different direction when she took a picture of a likely candidate for lime juice and decided to get a bottle of the sour mix instead. I dipped my toes back into the wild world of sours and tried a sidecar and a gin fizz, just for kicks. (There’s a lot you can do with a bottle of sour mix.)
I’ll be honest: I’m not a huge fan of whiskey sours. It brings back a lot of memories from college where I would buy the cheapest possible bottle of sour mix and make a litany of poor life choices I always regretted the next morning. I don’t know if this unplanned detour changed my mind all that much, but I am certainly more charitably disposed to them than I was before.
A mild historical tangent here: the oldest mention of a whiskey sour1 hails from Wisconsin, where it was mentioned in the Waukesha Plain Dealer in 1870. Its South American cousin, the pisco sour hails from the 1920s in Lima where it was the brainchild of American bartender Victor Vaughen Morris. The sweeter stepchild of both of them, the Amaretto sour, seems to have sprung to life in 1974- unfortunately, not by any unique means- Amaretto di Saronno invented the recipe, presumably to sell more amaretto.
The Ritz Hotel in Paris claims the origin of the Sidecar, while the Fizz is another family of cocktails you happily explore for quite some time- the earliest mention of that dates back to 1876. It became widely popular in the first four decades of the last century and was a hometown specialty of New Orleans where it was so popular (at least per the wiki page) that bars would “employ teams of bartenders that would take turns shaking the drinks.”
One thing that does stand out is the versatility of the sour and the fizz. I did not know this but when you throw an egg white in a whiskey sour it becomes a Scotch sour, when you swap out the whiskey for Scotch (though who would do that?) it becomes a scotch sour and if you throw on a few bar spoons of what the wiki page describes as ‘full-bodied red wine’ on the top, it becomes a New York sour. Much like the many variations of the Rusty Nail, you can plug and play to your taste.
Here’s what I did:
This was what I used for the amaretto sour (and broadly speaking the whiskey sour recipe as well.) I’m fairly sure that I used this recipe as a reference point- too many other recipes sort of have you combine simple syrup and lemon juice to get the overall effect of what I had going on with the sour mix so I found a super easy one and went from there.
The addition of sparkling water is a nice touch. It definitely cuts the sweetness of the amaretto a lot and made for a very pleasant drink indeed. I don’t know if it would be my go-to drink in February, but I could see knocking back a few of these in like, June, for instance.
I tried this basic formulation swapping out the amaretto for whiskey (which was pretty good and way less sweet)- but the interesting variation I found was an Amaretto Whiskey Sour, which combined everything. That was a tasty surprise!
Overall: if you don’t get the cheapest sour mix possible and are willing to play around, you can have fun with these. I saw some recipes recommend adding Sprite, but I think sparkling water is a better bet. You get the fizz with none of the sweetness that a soda would bring to the table. I do not subscribe to the ‘let’s get fancy’ school of cocktail making— but if you do, you can make your own sour mix— there are plenty of recipes out there, and that link will take you to one of ‘em. Also, many of these recipes do call for the use of egg whites. Given the current price of eggs that wasn’t going to happen either. My Grade: 8/10 Seems like more of a summer drink to me, but if you want to mix it up on a weekend, it is worth a try.
Next up, the Gin Fizz:
This one wasn’t bad. It was my first time making a fizz, so maybe I need more practice to up my fizz game, but it wasn’t bad. I’m pretty sure I used this recipe and again, with the price of eggs, I wasn’t about to mess around with the frothy egg white foam topping either. I swapped out the lemon juice + simple syrup/maple syrup- though the maple syrup might be an interesting option to experiment with- for the sour mix and added the soda water seen above.
Overall, it wasn’t bad. I can’t say it particularly knocked my socks off and I think thanks to long-standing familial habit, I’m always going to be a Gin and Tonic guy, but again, if you’re looking to stretch your legs and explore the world of the fizz or just have some gin you’d like to use, try a fizz. My Grade: 5/10
Finally, the Sidecar:
This might be some kind of cardinal sin in the world of sidecars, but I didn’t use cognac. Nor did I use brandy. Instead, I used pisco.
(Pause for shocked gasps, expressions of horror, etc.)
My underlying philosophy of cocktails is that you use what you have and I am all about taking the path of least resistance. It’s why I don’t spritz orange slices into my Old Fashioneds and am less than convinced about the whole notion of bitters. (It’s also why despite the fact that I love the idea of tiki drinks and have a copy of Smuggler’s Cove, the sheer amount of stuff you needed to make the drinks was something of a turn-off to me.)
I’m also not a big brandy guy. I don’t know why— a few years back, I secured some Jolly Time soda from the internet and the Missus and I did a round of Traditional Wisconsin Brandy Old Fashioneds and those were delicious. But outside of that, it’s not really my go-to liquor.
The Sidecar, however, has some good things going for it. For a start, the orange liqueur (Cointreau in my case) adds a certain flavor and it helps pretty up the color quite nicely. I am loathed to consider this a ‘brandy-based martini’ as it’s sort of inaccurate in that sense— but I suppose if you traded Cointreau for vermouth, it might be close to that.
Overall, I enjoyed this. It had a nice flavor profile and as cocktails go it was drinkable without being too sweet or too overwhelmed by one ingredient. It’s robust and if you want to shake up your Martini game and try something similar, but kinda different at the same time, you could do a lot worse than a Sidecar. My Grade: 7/10. Brandy is not really my thing, but I could make these now and again and enjoy them.
I don’t know if I would always keep a bottle of sour mix on hand in my beer fridge. It’s just not something I drink a lot of- but on occasion, every now and again, I would absolutely snag a bottle and make some sours, some fizzes, and the occasional Sidecar. As with all things cocktail related, you can make your own sour mix, but if you’re like me, I’d recommend finding a brand you like and sticking with that.
Cheers, everyone!
Interestingly enough, the wiki page mentions possible Peruvian origins for the whiskey sour, credited an Elliott Stubb who invented it in Iquque in 1872. Given the proximity to pisco and the ongoing arguments over which country does it better (Chile or Peru), it made me go ‘huh.’
Thanks for the Intel, very insightful. I’ve been on a Ole Fashioned kick for far to long, guess since thats the drink of my people being born on the Iowa / Wisconsin border. Time to explore sours and fizzes.
Cheers my friend!