Pickleback

Novice

The Pickleback is two shots taken in strict order: whiskey first, cold dill pickle brine immediately after. The brine erases the whiskey's burn so completely that people meeting it for the first time routinely ask to check the bottle. It was named at the Bushwick Country Club in Brooklyn in 2006, where the bartender Reggie Cunningham poured the pairing at a customer's suggestion using the bar's stock of McClure's pickles. The combination itself is much older, whiskey and brine having been folk practice in the American South and across Eastern Europe for generations. What the bar supplied was the name and the ritual. The mechanism is real. Salt and acid both interfere with how the palate registers ethanol heat, so a brine chaser arriving while the burn is still developing switches it off and leaves the warmth behind. It is the same principle as a salt rim on a Margarita, staged as a piece of theatre rather than as a garnish.

ShotPartyLate Night

Glassware: Shot Glass

Garnish: None: two glasses are the whole theatre

Ingredients

Serves

Irish Whiskey

30ml

Smooth Irish is traditional and it is the right call. The ritual is about removing an edge, so a soft whiskey suits it; a rough high-proof bourbon works and rather misses the point.

Pickle Brine

30ml

Straight from a jar of proper dill pickles, and cold. Sweet or bread-and-butter brine defeats the mechanism entirely, because it is the salt and the acid doing the work rather than the flavour.

Instructions

Pour the whiskey into one chilled shot glass and the cold brine into another.

Take the whiskey in one.

Chase immediately with the brine, without pausing.

Expert Tip

The order is the recipe. Whiskey, then brine, with no pause between them. Reversed, or with a gap, the trick does not work and you have simply drunk a shot of whiskey and a shot of pickle juice, which is a considerably worse experience. Both glasses want to be cold, and the brine especially. Warm brine tastes of vinegar and not much else; cold, it tastes clean and dill-forward and does the job properly. Use the brine from a jar of proper dill pickles rather than sweet or bread-and-butter ones. Sugar in the chaser defeats the whole mechanism: it is the salt and the acid doing the work, and sweetness gets in the way of both.

Flavour Profile

DillSaltWhiskeyCleanSharp

Where It Comes From

The Bushwick Country Club is a bar in Brooklyn rather than a country club, and in 2006 one of its bartenders, Reggie Cunningham, was asked by a customer to try whiskey with a chaser of brine from the bar's pickle jars. He did, named it on the spot, and it became the bar's signature order.

The pairing was not new. Whiskey with brine turns up as folk practice across the American South and throughout Eastern Europe, where vodka and pickles have been a standing combination for a very long time. What Brooklyn added was a name that travelled and a ritual precise enough to explain in one sentence, which between them took it worldwide inside about three years.

Why It Works

This is not bravado, it is measurable. The perception of alcohol heat is not a taste but a chemical irritation, registered by the same receptors that respond to capsaicin and to temperature. Salt and acid both interfere with that signal.

A brine chaser arrives a second or two after the whiskey, while the burn is still building, and effectively switches it off. What is left is the whiskey's warmth and flavour without the heat, which is why the effect feels like a trick rather than like masking.

It is the same principle as the salt on a Margarita rim, where salt suppresses bitterness and lifts the perception of sweetness. Here it is doing a cruder job far more dramatically.

The Spec

Two things matter and neither of them is expensive.

The whiskey should be smooth. Irish is traditional because the original bar poured it, and it is also the sensible choice: the whole ritual is about removing an edge, so starting with a gentle spirit gives a cleaner result. A high-proof rye or a rough bourbon works and the contrast is less interesting.

The brine must be dill and it must not be sweet. Bread-and-butter pickle brine has sugar in it, which gets in the way of both the salt and the acid, and the mechanism stops working.

A Drink With No Recipe

There is no mixing here, no ice, no glassware decision worth arguing about, and no technique beyond pouring two things into two glasses. That makes it an odd thing to write about at all.

What it has instead is a ceremony, and the ceremony is the entire point. Two glasses arriving together, one instruction, and a reaction that is the same every time somebody tries it. Very few drinks produce a predictable moment like that, and the ones that do tend to spread whether or not anybody is promoting them.

How to Serve It

Two chilled shot glasses, thirty millilitres in each, whiskey on the left and brine on the right if you want the order to be obvious.

Explain it once: whiskey, then brine, straight after, no pause. Then leave them to it, because the pause between the two is the only way this goes wrong.

The Spirit

Whiskey (Irish)

Whiskey distilled and matured on the island of Ireland, for at least three years in wooden casks. Triple distillation and an absence of peat are strong conventions rather than rules, and the exceptions are worth knowing before treating either as a definition.

Learn more

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Pickleback?

A shot of whiskey followed immediately by a shot of cold dill pickle brine. The brine suppresses the whiskey's burn, leaving the warmth and the flavour behind. It was named at the Bushwick Country Club in Brooklyn in 2006.

Why does the brine work?

Alcohol heat is a chemical irritation rather than a taste, and both salt and acid interfere with the signal. The chaser arrives while the burn is still building and switches it off. It is the same principle as a salt rim on a Margarita.

Which whiskey should I use?

Smooth Irish whiskey by tradition and by sense: the ritual is about removing an edge, so a gentle spirit suits it. A rough bourbon or a high-proof rye works, and the effect is a good deal less striking.

Does the type of pickle matter?

A great deal. It has to be dill brine and it must not be sweet. Bread-and-butter or sweet pickle brine has sugar in it, and sugar gets in the way of both the salt and the acid that make the whole thing work.

Tequila Ceremony

The Tequila Ceremony, salt then shot then lime, is the most performed drinks ritual on earth and the most misunderstood. The lick-sip-suck routine is a border-cantina invention for softening rough mixto tequila, and it is largely unknown in the Mexico that makes the good stuff, where fine tequila is sipped like the aged spirit it is. Performed properly it is honest chemistry in three acts: salt on the hand primes the palate and blunts the coming burn, the shot lands, and the lime’s acid extinguishes what remains. With a harsh tequila the ritual is genuinely protective equipment, and the sequence exists because the spirit it grew up around needed it. With a good 100 per cent agave blanco the ceremony becomes optional theatre, and sipping neat is the graduation it points toward. Learn the ritual for the nights that call for it, and learn to skip it for the bottles that deserve better.

Baby Guinness

The Baby Guinness is the best visual joke in the shot canon: coffee liqueur with a neat head of Irish cream, dressed exactly as a miniature pint of stout, down to the creamy collar sitting proud of the dark body. It contains no Guinness whatsoever, which is the punchline, and it came out of the Irish bar diaspora of the 1990s as the session’s ceremonial full stop. The build is a single float done well. Coffee liqueur poured cold, then Irish cream over the back of a spoon, slowly enough to sit as a defined head rather than a swirl. Four parts body to one of head reads most convincingly as a pint, and the drink repays the extra ten seconds with its entire effect. It tastes, pleasingly, like the dessert the joke deserves: sweet coffee under cool cream, one swallow, no burn. Trays of them arrive at Irish bars worldwide for birthdays and last orders, and there is something to be said for a drink that makes a whole table smile before it is drunk.

B-52

The B-52 is the layered shot with a service record: coffee liqueur, Irish cream and orange liqueur in three precise strata. The credit most often goes to Peter Fich at the Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta in the late 1970s, who named his drinks after bands he liked. The band had named itself for the beehive hairdo, the hairdo was named for the bomber, and the shot inherited the whole chain. The layers are density made visible. Coffee liqueur carries the most sugar and sinks to the base, Irish cream rides the middle, and the orange liqueur, lightest and driest, crowns the stack. Poured carefully over the back of a spoon each stratum sits distinct, and the whole thing goes down in one swallow that arrives in three acts. It became the definitive layered shooter of the 1980s and the test piece every bartender learns the spoon on, which is still the most useful thing about it.