Whiskey Cocktails, page 4
74 recipes, page 4 of 4
Base Spirit
Difficulty Level
Whiskey Sour
The Whiskey Sour is one of the oldest documented cocktails in the American canon, printed in Jerry Thomas’s 1862 bar guide, and its structure of whiskey, fresh lemon and sugar is the template every other whiskey sour derives from. The Honey Sour changes the sweetener. The Penicillin changes the sweetener and the technique. The Amaretto Sour changes the base spirit. Understand this drink and the whole family becomes readable. The egg white question matters more here than in most sours, because both versions are widely ordered and both are correct. With it, the drink is a Boston Sour: silky, with the foam carrying the bourbon’s vanilla to the nose before the lemon reaches the palate. Without it, sharper and more direct. Pre-made sour mix has shown a generation this drink at its worst. Built with lemon squeezed to order, a decent bourbon and a properly proportioned syrup, it surprises almost everyone whose expectations were formed by the imitation.
Whisky Mac
The Whisky Mac is Britain’s medicinal handshake: Scotch and green ginger wine at two to one, named by tradition for Colonel Hector Macdonald of the Raj, and prescribed against cold, damp and golf since the Victorian bottles first met. No ice historically, and no garnish ever. The build is the two-bottle canon at its most direct. The ginger wine’s fermented fire and raisin sweetness fold into malt as though the two had been cellared together, which in British households they effectively were. The ratio flexes with the weather: two to one as standard, equal parts for a genuine emergency. It sits in the ginger-and-whisky wing beside the Presbyterian’s dry sparkle, offering fortified intimacy where that one offers length, and it is the reason a bottle of green ginger wine is worth buying at the first cold snap and finishing before spring. Nobody drinks one in July, which is not a limitation so much as the whole design: a drink with a season, poured for weather that Britain reliably supplies.