Or, you’d at least be able to make it to the next port. Between the rum, the sugar and citrus, you’d have a happy and healthy ship of sailors. A bit of sugar would make it more palatable. So each day, the sailors might have a ration of rum and water with some citrus mixed in. Scurvy, caused by a lack of vitamin C, was rampant on long sea voyages, and one way to keep sailors supplemented with vitamin C was a bit of citrus juice each day. To keep the sailors from getting rowdy it was cut with what water they did have. The first recorded recipe of it is in Jerry Thomas’ The Bartender’s Guide of 1862, but there’s evidence that sailors were the first to drink this sort of sour cocktail.įresh water was rare on long voyages and sailors often had a ration of rum each day. Sours take out the weak and alter the old ratios just a little to get to a great balance of base spirit, sweet and sour. Punch generally contained spirit, sour, sweet and weak (tea or other filler beverage). Commonly thought to have derived from punch – considered to be the earliest of all cocktails – it’s a parsed down version of that ratio. I’ll be brief, but the sour itself is one of the earliest cocktails. These three whiskey sour variations in turn lead to hundreds of fantastic riffs by altering the base of just 3 or 4 ingredients. While there are endless variations of the whiskey sour, I’m focused this week on the three most well-known: the basic whiskey sour, the egg-white or Boston sour, and the New York sour (with a red-wine float). This week I’m focused on sours and as a bourbon girl I’m of course favoring the whiskey sour as my start to the week.

As an iconic cocktail, the whiskey sour meets several cocktail criteria for me: it’s easy to make, doesn’t require difficult ingredients, and is inevitably refreshing when made well.

Summer’s not over yet, and as far as I’m concerned, the whiskey sour is always in season. Jump to Recipe Print Recipe Classic Whiskey Sour

Best whiskey sour recipe ever