Highballs, page 3
52 recipes, page 3 of 3
Base Spirit
Difficulty Level
Whisky & Cola
The most ordered whisky drink in the world and the one people are most sniffy about, usually without having tried it made properly. The problem has never been the combination — it is that most cola is very sweet and tastes mainly of caramel colouring, which flattens whatever it is poured over. A cola made with real cola nut and Madagascan vanilla changes the arithmetic considerably. The vanilla is the interesting part: whisky gets its own vanilla character from time in oak, so the two are not competing flavours but the same one arriving from two directions. What you notice is that the whisky reads clearer, not more buried, which is the opposite of what people expect. Bourbon is the obvious partner and the one most will reach for. Scotch is the more interesting choice, because the cereal dryness of a blend gives the drink a spine that bourbon lets it do without.
Whisky & Ginger Ale
Two ingredients, one of which does most of the work. Whisky and ginger ale is the drink people reach for when they want whisky to last an hour rather than ten minutes, and the ginger ale decides whether that hour is worth having. A dry, properly gingery one sharpens the spirit and pushes the malt forward. A sweet one buries it under what tastes like flat lemonade with ambitions. The ratio here is three to one, which sounds generous to the mixer until you taste it against the two-to-one most pubs pour and notice the whisky is actually clearer at the longer measure. Orange is the garnish rather than lemon, and it is not decoration. Ginger and orange share a warm, slightly resinous note that lemon cuts straight through, so the peel oils sit with the drink instead of arguing with it. Build it in the glass, keep it cold, and do not stir it more than once.
Whisky & Ginger Beer
Ginger beer makes a heavier, sweeter, altogether louder drink than ginger ale does, and with Scotch it produces something that has been popular under various names for well over a century. Where ginger ale frames the whisky, ginger beer argues with it — brewed rather than flavoured, thick with fresh ginger heat, and carrying enough sugar to need the smoke and cereal weight of a blended Scotch to hold it steady. The result sits close to a mule without the lime, which is the main thing separating it from its more famous cousin. Orange rather than lime is the garnish here, and it softens the drink noticeably: the peel oil rounds off the ginger burn rather than sharpening it. This is the version to make when a whisky and ginger has felt too polite. It is not a subtle drink and it does not benefit from being treated as one.
Woo Woo
The Woo Woo is the 1980s stripped to essentials: vodka, peach schnapps and cranberry juice, three pours over ice with a name that is its own toast. It rode the same 1984 schnapps wave that produced the Fuzzy Navel and Sex on the Beach, and of the three it is the leanest, with no orange sunshine, just peach sweetness against cranberry sharpness at party speed. Its virtue is exactly that economy. The cranberry's acid does all the balancing a drink this simple needs, the schnapps needs no help from syrup, and the whole thing assembles in about the time it takes to say the name twice. Poured honestly, with decent vodka, an actual measure and cold cranberry, it remains what it always was: a drink with no ambitions beyond the next half hour, executed perfectly within them. That is a narrower brief than most cocktails set themselves, and one of the few that is met exactly.