Whiskey Collins

Where It Comes From

The Collins format arrived in America as a genever drink and stayed as a whiskey one. John Collins was a waiter at Limmer's Hotel in London in the early nineteenth century, and his long drink of genever, lemon, sugar and soda travelled across the Atlantic under his name.

Through the late nineteenth century, as Old Tom faded and America drank increasingly brown, the template migrated to whiskey and the John name often travelled with it. That is the source of a confusion which has never fully cleared: a good many mid-century American menus list a bourbon Collins as a John Collins, and a good many people learned it that way.

The tidier convention keeps John for the genever original and gives the whiskey version its own name.

Why the Soda Changes Everything

A whiskey sour and a whiskey Collins have the same first three ingredients. The soda is the only difference, and it produces two drinks with almost nothing in common in practice.

A sour is short, shaken, strained and served without ice or over one cube. It is concentrated, it is finished in ten minutes, and the whiskey is the loudest thing in it.

A Collins is roughly twice the volume, served long over a full glass of ice, and drunk across an hour. The whiskey drops from lead to structure and the drink becomes something you can have on an afternoon rather than something that ends one. Same sour bones, entirely different purpose.

Bourbon Through Bubbles

Carbonation is not kind to subtlety. It lifts volatile aromatics out of the glass and flattens anything delicate underneath.

Bourbon's vanilla and caramel come from the barrel and they are neither delicate nor volatile, so they survive the treatment intact. That is why this works better than it has any right to: the drink reads as barrel-aged sparkling lemonade, in the best possible sense, rather than as whiskey that has been diluted.

Rye does the same thing with pepper instead of vanilla and produces a drier, considerably sharper drink. Which of the two is better is a matter of what you want the afternoon to be like.

The Syrup Measure

Twenty millilitres against twenty-five of lemon is a fuller sugar measure than the gin version takes, and it is not because bourbon needs more sweetening.

Bourbon carries oak tannin, which reads as dryness and slight astringency, particularly once the drink has been extended with soda. The extra five millilitres of syrup is balancing that rather than balancing the lemon, which is why the finished drink does not taste sweeter than a Tom Collins despite containing more sugar.

Switch to rye, which is drier still, and expect to want it.

How to Serve It

Shaken for ten seconds, strained over fresh ice in a collins glass, topped with soda and stirred once. A lemon wheel and a good cherry.

Tall, cold, and refilled. It is the whiskey drink for an afternoon that a highball would bore and a sour would rush, which is a narrower brief than it sounds and a genuinely useful one.

Frequently Asked Questions