Friday afternoon while closing up for the week, I got an email from a cocktail mail list about National Whiskey Sour Day that got me thinking, first about where did this drinking “holiday” come from, most trace themselves back to marketing blitzes designed to pump up numbers for some producer, hometown tourist board, or even a single bar with a reputation. But whiskey sours are one of my all-time favorite cocktails, and a cocktail archetype, as well as the place I think any home bartender should start their cocktail shaker education, so I also wandered down the “how can I convince more people to make their own whiskey sours?” rabbit hole by looking at a bunch of classic sour recipes.
While I had very little luck on my first quest for the holiday history side, I guess it just magically appeared one day and was declared so, oh well; my dig into the ranges of recipes that fall under the “whiskey sour” branch of summertime deliciousness was much more fruitful. When I grew up, Whiskey Sours were basically adult Kool-Aid: open a foil pouch of powder, add whiskey and ice, stir and top with cherries/orange slice, whatever. Eventually it became open a bottle of sour mix instead of the pouch, but little difference in the outcome other than the range of sour flavors available, even homemade since anybody could make a mix, while few could make a powder.
But when I first returned from living abroad in 2003, I was accompanied by a large pent-up demand for tastes of home, like BBQ (mmmmm). I loved all of the adventurous meals I had in my 2 fast years in Europe, but I was ready for hamburgers and pork chops and craft beer. For my designated liquor, I turned to Jim Beam white label bourbon as my domestic equivalent of the tasty Four Roses yellow label bourbon* I had gotten used to in France for spiking my lemonade and ginger ale.
I eventually found my way also to celebrity bartender Dale DeGroff’s classic “Craft of the Cocktail”** and one of my all-time favorite recipes, the Stone Sour with an alternative whiskey base, spicy Rye instead of bourbon, and fresh orange juice in addition to the standard lemon juice. Thankfully I also found Rittenhouse’s Rye to match and I’ve been making variations of taste-bud pleasing sours of all stripes basically ever since.
It took me a while to get to the sour for the very reason Mr. Degroff aptly pointed out in the intro to his Sours section where he declared them both the “benchmark of the professional bartender” and simultaneously “the biggest challenge for the amateur”: it’s really hard balancing the sour citrus with the sweetener to make a successful sour cocktail. Unfortunately I didn’t start my cocktail explorations with Craft of the Cocktail, so the first failed attempts I made at my bourbon sours was made with lemon juice from a squeeze bottle, since at the time I only made lemonade and salad dressing, and of course other sauces, with fresh lemon juice, and since I didn’t ever directly taste the squeeze bottle lemon juice to do a taste comparison, it seemed like the most economical/reasonable way to have an impromptu fresh whiskey sour.
Yuck!!! Everything either tasted way too tart from too much of the reconstituted juice, or too sweet from all of the sugar it took to “balance” it out, such as I could. Once I switched to the straight stuff hand-squeezed in some way, a whole world opened up for me of bright summer tastes fueled by brown liquors livened up simply with fresh lemon juice, sugar and water.
Now I know for certain that if I only have a bag of lemons, sugar of some sort (natural or refined), and a bottle of legit bourbon of just about any flavor, I can host a small party with little effort, assuming the house and/or kitchen is clean of course.
But I get ahead of myself and how I personally got past those initial difficulties.
The original email I received was from Simon Difford’s cocktail site, and in the referenced post he addressed the question of how best to balance out a whiskey sour with the concept of standard ratios of citrus to sweetener to whiskey. He gives the classic whiskey sour recipe as 2 ounces of whiskey, 1 ounce of syrup, and 3/4 ounce lemon juice, which yields a 3:4:8 ratio, one that he finds too sweet, so he modifies to be 1/2 ounce of syrup and 1 ounce of juice, resulting in his preferred 4:2:8 ratio.
That’s 3/4 to 4/4 to 8/4 vs. 4/4 to 2/4 to 8/4, in case the extra visual helps others as much as it did me.
I’ve got a boat-load of cocktail guides of all manner, so I thought I’d do a quick experiment to see where other’s sours measured against these ratios, starting with my beloved Stone Sour. Its recipe is 1 1/2 ounces rye, 1 ounce syrup, 3/4 ounces lemon juice, plus another 1 ounce of orange juice.
OJ is the tricky one here for the ratio, since if you classify it as strictly citrus, that makes the ratio 7:4:6, or if you think it is more of a sweetener, which I personally do, that puts it to 3:8:6, or you can split the difference and wind up with 5:6:6, whatever. That’s kind of a mess, and is the kind of thing that makes me wonder how far my taste preference is along the more sweet vs. dry spectrum of Difford’s preferred formulation.
By contrast, the basic sour recipe also in Craft of the Cocktail is 1.5 – 2 ounces whiskey, plus 1 ounce syrup and 3/4 ounces juice, which gives you a dryer/stronger drink with a 3:4:6 or Difford’s classic 3:4:8 ratio, depending on how much of the whiskey you wind up pouring.
Another classic sour variation from that book, the Brown Derby, takes 2 ounces of bourbon, 1 ounce of grapefruit juice, and 1/2 ounce of honey syrup, a 4:2:8 ratio–exactly what Difford appears to prefer, maybe there is some truth to the magic math and I’ve just got a sweet tooth! Then I looked at the recipe for the honey syrup, and it’s actually a rich honey syrup, made with 2 x honey + 1 x water instead of roughly equal parts honey to water, so it’s actually sweeter than its baseline ratio makes it appear. That got me looking back at Difford’s preferred recipes as well, and sure enough, both of his syrups are also rich simple syrups, albeit with 2 x plain sugar to water instead of honey.
So maybe my taste isn’t quite so far out on the sweet outlier limb as I thought, though I do think my baseline flavor preference is probably more on the sweet side, just not quite “give me fuzzy navels all day!”
I’d imagine that insecurity I felt about my tastes vs. the “standard” is pretty familiar to other beginner home bartenders who want to take their mixology skills a little more seriously, but don’t want to embarrass themselves in front of other drinks enthusiasts beyond making Negronis, Manhattans/Martinis and the new old-style Old Fashioneds.
The reality as I found in my investigations is that there is a wide range of “standard” sweetness levels of sours, even among the professionals who write books. They’re just tweaking that balance to match the taste of whomever it is that they’re most typically making drinks for, whose own drink preferences may be dependent on regional differences or even just a local bar subculture within there that bands together behind a charismatic taste-maker, or just simply like-minded drunken souls.
Experiment with a little more citrus, a little less sugar, a slightly stronger Rye***, split the citrus between oj and lemon, or go an entirely different direction with grapefruit juice, but let your own taste guide you as to what ratio works to your belly’s satisfaction and have another Whiskey Sour until you get it right!
* I had never seen Four Roses prior to moving to Paris in 2001, at the time it was only available for the export market. When I saw it on the local grocery shelves, I was a little suspicious, but the price was right, so I picked it up, loved it and it wound up my go-to bourbon while abroad. back to text
** Arriving back right in the middle of the craft cocktail movement and its emphasis on the very same fresh-squeezed juices as emphasized in “Craft of the Cocktail” on fresh-squeezed juices wasn’t too much of a stretch, since it generally just required fresh-squeezed lemon juice, just like I used in the homemade lemonade I’ve made everywhere I’ve been since middle school, including those most recent international destinations, needing only lemons, sugar and water to make–you have to not like lemonade to deny yourself the pleasures of its refreshment on a hot summer day wherever you are. back to text
***Watch out for ABV differences as you experiment, since just swapping out 80-prooj Jim Beam for 101-proof Wild Turkey or 100-proof Rittenhouse Rye takes the classic 3:4:8 cocktail from .8 ounces of alcohol at 16.8% ABV to 1 ounce of alcohol with a 21% ABV (assuming 1 ounce of water volume added to final drink to result in 4.75 ounces of liquid after shaking), further diluted some if served on ices of any type. back to text
Here’s a few of the more interesting posts I came upon while researching the history of the holiday:
- https://alcoholprofessor.com/blog/2015/01/27/classic-cocktails-in-history-the-whiskey-sour/
- https://www.bourbonbanter.com/drink/cocktails/celebrating-national-whiskey-sour-day-2016/#.W4G38JNKjHo
- https://www.diffordsguide.com/encyclopedia/1475/cocktails/whiskey-sour-cocktail