It’s difficult to overstate how effective an egg white is in transforming whiskey’s astringency into something silky smooth. Now, if you were disinclined to try it before, I doubt I just sweetened the pot with the promise of a raw egg, but hear me out: Just like when you eat them, egg whites don’t taste like anything really, but serve here to give the whole cocktail a velvety texture, a pretty white head, and most importantly, to bind to the tannins in the spirit, smoothing out the rougher edges of the whiskey. The smoothest and most elegant way to make a Whiskey Sour is to make it with egg white. Express a lemon peel over the top of the foam for aroma and discard and decorate the foam with a few drops or dashes of Angostura Bitters. Strain into coupe or martini glass-it’ll come out white at first, and the color will emerge over the course of a minute under a paper-smooth head of foam. Add ice, seal tins and shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds. “Dry” shake ingredients without ice for five seconds to whip the egg. There aren’t a lot of hard and fast rules in mixology, but one of the core ones is that if something glows in the dark, you probably shouldn’t drink it.Īdd all ingredients to a shaker tin. And at worst the very kind of incandescent, high-fructose corn-syrup, 0 percent juice bullshit that the whole modern cocktail movement was created to reject. Sweet and Sour Mix is the zombified version of the “sour” cocktail principle I talked about above, and even the most artisanal small-batch free-range organic version is at best pasteurized, oxidized and overly sweet.

The only real unacceptable way to make them is unfortunately still the most common one, which is to treat “whiskey sour” like a recipe instead of a cocktail name, and to simply combine whiskey and sour mix. Harness that power, and you can make this cocktail any way you want. This is the principle by which all sour cocktails work-it’s why Coca-cola is a better mixer than Iced Tea, it’s why you hate shooting tequila but love drinking Margaritas-and in this case, it is the best way to diffuse whiskey’s intensity. But in a cocktail, if you take something extremely sour (like citrus juice) and you balance it against something extremely sweet (like simple syrup), that tug-of-war between these two mammoth sensations is so intense on your tongue that it creates a level of misdirection that would impress David Blaine, because while you get the taste of the liquor, you don’t register the heat. This is why people use chasers after taking shots, to distract themselves from the unpleasantness of alcohol’s fire. The “sour” cocktail is as simple as it gets, and it works like this: Alcohol, as you are no doubt already aware, is astringent.

While the term “Whiskey Sour” first shows up in print in 1870, it’s far too foundational to have really been invented anywhere. Here's What We Know About Goose Island's Beloved Bourbon County Stout Beer for 2023 Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club Is Closing After 20 Years Watch: How N.Y.C.’s Lure Fishbar Serves Thousands of Oysters a Week

Whiskey sour recipe no simple syrup