The Whiskey Sour Makes a Comeback
By Kathleen Squires
The whiskey sour—you know, that drink you ordered when you very much wanted to pass for 21—is no longer considered a rookie mistake, thanks to whiskey’s newfound cachet and the craft-cocktail movement’s use of fresh ingredients. During the sour’s post–World War II heyday—it dates to at least the 1860s, possibly earlier, and had more than a half-century run before Prohibition nearly killed it—”people were into packaged everything,” says Jamie Boudreau, bartender-owner of Seattle’s Canon, and those mouth-puckering bottled sour mixes tainted the drink’s once-good name. Here, the sweetest places to get the newest sours.
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Western Sour
Raines Law Room at the William Hotel, New York City
"When I try a new whiskey, I put it in a whiskey sour to see how it stands up," says head bartender Meaghan Dorman. Hers comes from an old tiki-cocktail book: bourbon, grapefruit juice, lime juice, velvet falernum, and nutmeg, which she grates over a block of ice in a rocks glass.
Banksy Sour
Canon, Seattle
"The sour is the perfect drink for the new whiskey drinker," Boudreau says (the classic recipe is whiskey, lemon juice, simple syrup, and sometimes egg white). His Banksy Sour, named after the street artist, incorporates scotch and ginger-lemon tea. The big finish? Banksy’s "Balloon Girl," stenciled onto the egg-white froth with bitters.
8th and Orchard
Bar Boulud, Boston
The Ward 8, invented in 1898, is Boston’s version of the sour. It’s made with rye, grenadine, and lemon and orange juices. Jake Kirsch’s 8th and Orchard substitutes house-made apple cider for orange juice (thus the Orchard). The drink “was not meant to be a sipper,” he says, so it comes on the rocks in a double old-fashioned glass.
Pumpkin Pi
Zymology 21, San Diego
This one mixes bourbon, lemon, and piloncillo (Mexican unrefined sugar). The foamy head atop lead bartender Louis Chavez’s sour is made from egg white and delicata squash—which is charged with CO² and served in a beaker. “The Pumpkin Pi is a deconstructed sour,” Chavez says. “We don’t want to muck it up.”
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The Endorsement
Toby Cecchini, co-owner of the Long Island Bar in Brooklyn and author of the memoir Cosmopolitan: A Bartender’s Life, on his enduring love for the whiskey sour:
"When I was a kid, I would go to this mall on the outskirts of my town—the East Towne Mall in Madison, Wisconsin—where they had cocktail candy, and my favorite was the whiskey sour. When I had my first actual whiskey sour—at an overly posh café in France when I was 20—I was like, ‘Wow, that’s the candy I grew up with!’ I think it’s a lot of people’s first drink. Then later you realize, ‘That’s a good drink!’ It has the three pillars that are the bedrock of every great cocktail: sweet, sour, and strong. I’ve been doing a variation on a version called the Penicillin, created by Sam Ross at Milk & Honey in New York City in the mid-2000s. I swap in fresh ginger syrup for simple syrup."
Cecchini’s Whiskey Sour
2 oz bourbon or rye
1 oz fresh lemon juice
¾ oz ginger syrup (one part freshly squeezed ginger juice, two parts white sugar)
Mix all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake well for at least 20 seconds and strain over cracked ice in a double old-fashioned or large rocks glass. Garnish with a lemon wheel or a “flag” of a cherry toothpicked to a slice of orange.
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photo: Andrew Hetherington
