Recipe: Whisky Sour
Sometimes you don’t want a hundred ingredients and a complicated recipe. Sometimes you just want a simple cocktail with four ingredients that’s on the table within a few minutes. At times like that, I’m incredibly happy with the Whisky Sour. You’ll want to drink this refreshing cocktail all year round. Simple yet effective.
Today, May 18, is World Whisky Day. An extra good reason to put my favorite cocktail, the Whisky Sour, in the spotlight. The Whisky Sour is a true classic; this delicious cocktail was already described in How to Mix Drinks by Jerry Thomas in 1862. This book is probably the most famous bartending and cocktail book of all time, and also the first real cocktail book ever published in the United States.
What exactly is a Sour?
Good question! A Sour is a type of cocktail, just like Punch, for example. Sour cocktails are all about the combination of sour (lemon juice) and sweet (simple syrup). Egg white is added while shaking to create a beautiful layer of foam and a smooth flavor. A Sour cocktail therefore contains the following components:
- 2 parts spirit
- 1 part sour
- 1 part sweet
- one egg white
And the fun thing is, you can fill in each ingredient however you like. For example, you can make a Pisco sour, the way they drink it in South America. You then use Pisco as the spirit (a grape distillate), but you can also use Gin, Tequila, Rum or, of course, Whisky. Your sour component can be lime or lemon. And your sweet component can be sugar water, but a liqueur or syrup, such as agave syrup, works too; whatever rocks your boat.
How to make a Whisky Sour
- Start by separating the egg white. Use a raw egg and separate the white from the yolk in a small bowl. Make sure no yolk gets into the egg white.
- Use a cocktail shaker, but start without ice; using a bar measure, add 50 ml Talisker Whisky to the cocktail shaker, followed by the simple syrup.
- Now squeeze the lemon into your shaker using a citrus squeezer.
- Add the egg white.
- Shake firmly (dry shaken), then add ice and shake it once more until a frosty layer appears on the shaker.
- Pour the mixture from the shaker into a beautiful Tumbler (Whisky) glass. Pour in the ice as well. If you’ve shaken it well, your Whisky Sour will have a beautiful white layer of foam on top.
- Garnish with a lemon peel.
Whisky Sour or Whiskey Sour?
I’m referring to it here as a Whisky Sour, without an e, because I’m using a Scottish Whisky, Talisker. If I were to use an Irish variant for my Sour, the e would be added again—in Ireland they spell it Whiskey, while in Scotland it’s Whisky. The difference in spelling arose when the Irish wanted to make a clear distinction between the different types of whisky. To distinguish their high-quality whiskey from Scottish whisky, they added the letter e.
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