Seven Riffs on the Classic and Six Sours Beyond Whiskey

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Part 1

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August 25th is National Whiskey Sour Day. It's an unofficial holiday, the kind bars use as an excuse for a discount, but the drink earns the attention on its own terms. It looks simple. Bartenders have been arguing over the proportions since the 1800s and still have not settled it.

Where the Sour Family Comes From

The whiskey sour belongs to an older family called sours: a base spirit, an acid, and a sweetener. Jerry Thomas laid the format out in his 1862 guide under a heading called Fixes and Sours. The section runs four numbered recipes, two Fixes and two Sours: a Brandy Fix, a Gin Fix, a Brandy Sour, and a Gin Sour. Two footnotes add a Santa Cruz Fix and a Santa Cruz Sour, rum standing in for the brandy and the gin, and a last line tells you to put the lemon skin in the glass.

There's no whiskey sour in it. That isn't for lack of whiskey. The book carries eleven other whiskey drinks, punches and a julep and a smash and a cocktail and a crusta and a sling and a skin. The sour just wasn't one of them yet. Seven years later it was. Haney's Steward & Barkeeper's Manual printed a Bourbon Sour in 1869: a wine-glass and a half of bourbon, a full wine-glass of water, a tablespoon of sugar, half a lemon squeezed in, the rim of the glass rubbed with it, and a slice of fresh lemon dropped in after. Still wetter than the modern build, seven years on.

The earliest newspaper mention I could find comes a few months after that, on January 4, 1870, in the Waukesha Plain Dealer in Wisconsin, a passing line about a man ordering one, written as though readers already knew what it was.

There's a competing origin worth knowing because it doesn't hold up. A 1962 Universidad Nacional de Cuyo publication, citing the newspaper El Comercio, credits the drink to Elliott Stubb, a steward off the sailing ship Sunshine who put in at the port of Iquique and mixed whisky with sugar, ice, and the local Limón de Pica. Iquique was Peruvian at the time and only became Chilean in 1883, under the Treaty of Ancón. The story is set in 1872, three years after Haney printed a recipe and two years after a Wisconsin paper printed the name as something readers would recognize. Stubb turns up in pisco sour origin lore too, which is its own contested territory.

Thomas's sour is also wetter than the modern one. His Brandy Sour is the Brandy Fix with the fruit stripped out: a tablespoon of sugar, a quarter lemon, a wine-glass of brandy, and half a wine-glass of water, built on shaved ice. The modern build dropped the measured water. The dilution stayed, since syrup carries water and a hard shake against ice adds a good deal more. His parting instruction on the section is to put the lemon skin in the glass.

The Sour at Sea

The pattern is older than the bar manuals, though the line isn't as direct as it usually gets told. In 1740 Vice-Admiral Edward Vernon of the Royal Navy ordered his sailors' daily half-pint rum ration cut with a quart of water and issued in two servings, so nobody could hoard it and drink it all at once. His order suggested that men who wanted to could buy sugar and limes out of their own pay to make the result palatable.

That's the part usually flattened. The sugar and citrus weren't issued and weren't required. They were an optional purchase. Vernon wore a cloak of grogram, a coarse silk-and-mohair cloth, and was already nicknamed Old Grog, so the sailors named the watered rum after him, and not as a compliment.

Call grog a precursor rather than a parent. Spirit, water, citrus, sugar, in the right shape a century early. The scurvy framing deserves its own caveat: the Royal Navy didn't adopt citrus as policy until 1795, fifty-five years later, and some historians read Vernon's instruction as being about making the ration drinkable and not about medicine. The lime is where the British got stuck with "limey" either way.

One more piece of lineage. The whiskey sour may not be the first sour in print at all. A gin sour reportedly appears on an 1856 menu from Mart Ackerman's Saloon in Toronto, held by the New York Public Library, which would put it thirteen years ahead of Haney.

The Scent

Serge Lutens Ecrin de Fumee, perfume 24 in the collection. Cacao, rum, smoke, tobacco, and woody notes, described by the house as an accord, with no clean top-middle-base split.

It anchors four of the eight drinks here, the ones still built on the whiskey-lemon-sweetener core with nothing loud competing: the Classic, the Boston, the New York, and the Gold Rush. The rum note does what the whiskey does in the glass, the base everything else sits on. The cacao brings a rounded sweetness that stands in for syrup better than a literal sugar note would. There's smoke in it, but the boozy ambient kind that comes off rum and tobacco, not the medicinal phenolic character of a peated Scotch.

The other four step outside that core far enough that forcing this bottle onto them stopped making sense. A different base spirit, a mint-driven build, no added syrup, or a different fruit entirely. Each gets its own pairing, noted where the drink is built.

When the Egg Arrived

Egg in a drink is old, and so is separating it. Thomas's 1862 book is full of both. One flip takes the whites of two eggs and the yolks of four, beaten apart and recombined. A mulled wine is subtitled "with the whites of eggs" and calls for twelve of them whipped to a froth. His egg nog has you beat the whites separately and float them on top, which is a foam cap under another name.

None of it goes into the four Fixes and Sours. The technique was sitting in the same volume and nobody had put it in a sour yet.

That changed within about twenty years. Patsy McDonough's 1883 Bar-Keeper's Guide has a Frosted Sour built with bourbon and the white of an egg, which appears to be the first. It still carries the half wine-glass of water, and the rim gets wet with lemon juice and dipped in powdered sugar.

William Schmidt's 1892 Flowing Bowl prints the white of an egg as a straight ingredient in the Delicious Sour, no hedging. By 1922 Robert Vermeire could write in Cocktails: How to Mix Them that a few drops of white of egg improve all sours, and he stated it as settled advice. The fizz family picked it up over the same stretch, with the posthumous 1887 edition of Thomas's guide naming a Golden Fizz for the yolk version and Henry C. Ramos building the Ramos Gin Fizz on egg white in New Orleans in 1888.

So the egg is later than the drink but not by much, and the Boston Sour is on firmer ground than I first thought. What the egg white does is mostly textural: a foam cap that softens perceived acidity and takes some tannic bite off an oakier whiskey. It isn't flavorless, it affects aroma and mouthfeel, but nobody drinks a sour for the taste of the egg.

On raw egg: use pasteurized whites if you're serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young, or immunocompromised. Alcohol and citrus do not reliably make raw egg safe, whatever the internet says. Pasteurized whites whip nearly as well and remove the question.

About the Carton

Pasteurized whites come in a carton, and the carton has a reputation it only half deserves. America's Test Kitchen found they pour looser than fresh whites and take more than twice as long to whip to stiff peaks. That is a meringue problem. A sour asks for a fraction of that foam, so most of the penalty never shows up in a shaker. Difford's ran the direct comparison, carton against fresh in a whiskey sour with a reverse dry shake, and could not separate the two on foam or on taste.

The variable is the brand. Pasteurization aggregates egg-white protein, and a 2024 study in Food Chemistry traced the drop in foaming capacity to exactly that. How much any given carton loses depends on how it was processed. A 2026 paper in Poultry Science measured four major proteins across ten commercial cartons and found little overall change in composition, though it tested chemistry rather than foam. US regulations let producers add whipping aids to make up the difference and require them named on the front of the carton, so you can read which kind you are buying before you get to the register. Skip anything listing sugar or starch.

Pour 1 oz (30 ml) per egg white and dry shake harder than you would with a fresh one. The correction is the same one aquafaba needs, for the same reason.

The Vegan Version

Two builds below use egg white. The Boston Sour requires it, that's the entire distinction between it and the Classic. The Big Apple Sour treats it as optional. Both work with chickpea water.

Aquafaba is the liquid in a can of chickpeas. It foams because of a mix of proteins, soluble carbohydrates, and saponins working together, not any single component, and results vary a fair amount between brands depending on how concentrated the liquid is. If yours comes out thin, reduce it gently on the stove and let it cool.

The discovery is recent and has two names on it. In December 2014 Joël Roessel, a French opera tenor working through vegetable foams systematically, got liquid from red kidney beans and hearts of palm to whip, though his version needed starch and gum to hold. In February 2015 Goose Wohlt found the version that worked: chickpea liquid alone, no additives, as a direct egg white replacement using ordinary meringue technique. He built the name from the Latin aqua and faba, water and bean, and the community that formed around the discovery adopted it that March.

1 oz (30 ml), or two tablespoons, replaces one egg white. Dry shake harder than you would with egg, a full 15 seconds. The foam is comparable to egg white and often holds a little better, with none of the faint sulfur note raw egg can leave. Plenty of bartenders reach for it whether or not anyone at the table is vegan.

What I Pour

Every whiskey build below is written for Rittenhouse Rye Bottled in Bond, the standard bar rye for sours and the one I reach for. Bourbon works throughout if you want it rounder and sweeter. Rye keeps more spine against the lemon. Two recipes here, the Gold Rush and the Paper Plane, are canonically bourbon drinks, and I've written those as their creators built them.

If you don't have the Rittenhouse, Buffalo Trace, Woodford Reserve, and Four Roses all hold up. Four Roses is a Kentucky distillery despite what the name suggests to a New Yorker, and its higher-rye recipes land closest to what the Rittenhouse does.

For the Penicillin, blended Scotch is traditional but not compulsory. Johnnie Walker Black is the easy answer, Double Black the better one if you have it, since the extra peat means the float has less to do. Balvenie DoubleWood 12 takes it somewhere else, a single malt with enough sherry-cask weight to stand up to the ginger. Then move the smoke around: instead of a quarter ounce floated on top, build it with 1½ oz Johnnie Walker Black and ½ oz Ardbeg Wee Beastie so peat runs through the whole drink. Wee Beastie is five years old and bottled at 47.4%, young and sharp enough to hold its edge under lemon where an older, rounder Ardbeg would disappear.

There's an accident in the two bottles I use most. Rittenhouse is bottled in bond. So is the Laird's apple brandy in the last drink. Bottled in Bond is a federal standard from March 1897 and it's specific: one distilling season, January to June or July to December, one distiller, one distillery, at least four years in a federally bonded warehouse under government supervision, bottled at exactly 100 proof, nothing added but water, and the label has to name the distillery. It came with a tax incentive to get distillers to opt in, and it landed nine years before the Pure Food and Drug Act.

The Syrups

Seven of the eight use a syrup. Only three need something you can't buy at a normal grocery store. None of them is difficult, though the cinnamon wants an hour of steeping and the ginger wants juicing. Syrup concentration matters more than people expect: ¾ oz of 1:1 simple and ¾ oz of 3:1 honey syrup are not interchangeable, and swapping one for the other will throw the balance.

Eight Worth Making

House proportions here run 2 oz spirit, ¾ oz lemon, ¾ oz syrup, which is a touch drier and more spirit-forward than the older books. Adjust the lemon by a few drops either way depending on how sharp your fruit is that week.

1. Classic Whiskey Sour

The bar-default version. No egg, straight over ice, garnished simply. Every other drink on this list is arguing with it.

2. Boston Sour

The same build, except the egg white is required. Plenty of bars use "Boston Sour" and "whiskey sour" interchangeably and just ask whether you want egg in it. The name itself has no documented origin I could find, no inventor and no founding bar, so treat it as a convention rather than a pedigree. The drink underneath it is well documented; the label isn't.

3. Whiskey Smash

The other drink here with an 1862 pedigree, though not in the form you'd be served today. Thomas's Whiskey Smash, number 96, is a half tablespoon of sugar, a tablespoon of water, a wine-glass of whiskey, two sprigs of mint, and shaved ice. No lemon at all. It's a short julep. Dale DeGroff revived it in the 1990s by muddling lemon wedges into it, and that citrus is what turned a julep into a sour. The version below uses juice instead of wedges, which is cleaner but gives up the peel oils DeGroff's muddling releases. Use three or four lemon wedges instead if you want his.

Scent exception: Ralph Lauren Polo, the original 1978 green bottle, perfume 803. Juniper, basil, artemisia, caraway, and coriander up top, pine needles and leather through the heart, tobacco, oakmoss, patchouli, and cedar underneath. There's no mint in it, and that's the point. Thomas's smash had no lemon; Polo has no mint. Both are the older, greener version of something later modernized with citrus, the smash by DeGroff and Polo by way of the 2021 Cologne Intense, which added grapefruit and spearmint and stripped out the oakmoss and leather.

This is the one pairing here I didn't reason my way into. My father wore the original Polo. I keep a bottle of it now, with the 2021 Intense next to it on the same shelf. The newer one is cleaner, easier to wear, better behaved in a room full of people. The old one smells like him.

4. New York Sour

The classic build with a red wine float poured over the back of a spoon. It shows up in Chicago around 1883 and was called a Chicago Sour and a Continental Sour before the New York name stuck, which is documented in Boston by 1885. Because the wine sits on top, the first sip is wine-led and tannic. It integrates as you go, and the sour underneath asserts itself by the end. Any dry, food-friendly red works. Malbec is the easy default.

5. Gold Rush

Bourbon, lemon, and honey syrup instead of simple. It came about around 2000 when T.J. Siegal, a regular sitting at the bar at New York's Milk & Honey, asked for his usual whiskey sour made with the honey syrup already sitting out instead of simple syrup. He wasn't working the stick; he was a customer with a good idea. It's been a modern-classic staple since. The original runs 2 oz bourbon, 1 oz lemon, ¾ oz rich honey syrup, which is tarter than the house proportions I use elsewhere. I've given the original below.

6. Penicillin

Scotch instead of American whiskey, which stretches the definition, but it's built on the same bones. Sam Ross created it at Milk & Honey in 2005 as a riff on the Gold Rush: blended Scotch instead of bourbon, the sweetener split between honey syrup and the bar's ginger syrup, and a float of smoky Islay single malt so the smoke hits before anything else. Most published versions combine the two into one honey-ginger syrup, which is easier, keeps longer, and lands sweeter. The split is how Ross describes building it.

Scent exception: Montale Oud Tobacco. Citrus, cumin, and sumac up top, oud, incense, and orange blossom through the middle, oud, tobacco, and tonka underneath. Ecrin de Fumee's smoke is boozy and ambient. This drink has an actual peated float on it and needs something medicinal to match.

7. Paper Plane

Equal parts bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino, and lemon. There's no added syrup, but the drink isn't unsweetened: both Aperol and Nonino are liqueurs, and U.S. regulations require a liqueur to carry at least 2.5% sugar by weight. They supply the sweetness and the bitterness at once. Toby Maloney asked Sam Ross for a summer drink for Chicago's The Violet Hour, and in 2007 or 2008, depending on the source, Ross sent back a bourbon-forward riff on the Last Word.

Scent exception: Xerjoff Richwood. Tangerine, bergamot, and grapefruit up top, damask rose and black currant through the middle, sandalwood, patchouli, labdanum, vanilla, and musk underneath. The grapefruit carries the bitter-bright register the Aperol carries in the glass, and the black currant has a liqueur-adjacent tartness close to what the Nonino is doing.

8. The Big Apple Sour

I built this one, but I can't claim I invented it. Sam Ross got there first with the Harvest Sour: rye split evenly with applejack, lemon, simple syrup, egg white, Angostura. Saveur's version of his recipe even names Laird's and Rittenhouse specifically, which is what was already on my shelf. That makes Ross responsible for three of the eight drinks here, counting the Penicillin and the Paper Plane. The Gold Rush belongs to Siegal.

What's mine is the two swaps. Cinnamon syrup instead of plain, and Fee Brothers peach bitters instead of Angostura. The peach is the part that matters. It pulls the apple brandy toward stone fruit and puts the drink in late summer instead of the Thanksgiving register the Harvest Sour lands in.

The New York angle is deliberate. Hudson Whiskey out of Gardiner works here if you want the whiskey half distilled in-state. Laird & Company has been in New Jersey since 1780, though every drop has been distilled at their North Garden, Virginia facility since 1976, so the Jersey part is the company and not the still. A good Calvados substitutes for the Laird's, softer and less apple-forward.

Scent exception: Xerjoff Alexandria II. Rosewood, lavender, apple, and cinnamon up top, rose, cedar, and lily of the valley through the middle, oud, sandalwood, amber, vanilla, and musk underneath. The most literal pairing here, apple brandy against an actual apple top note, and the oud in the base is why it sits in Xerjoff's Oud Stars collection.

One format, eight drinks, and the only equipment you can't improvise is a shaker. That's the case for making one on its own day instead of ordering it.

Part 2

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Yesterday's whiskey sour piece made a point of showing its work: primary sources, a page from an 1862 bar book, a page from an 1869 one. This one doesn't. It's the companion piece, six sours built on six different bottles, none of them brown spirits, with proportions and method and nothing else.

The Format Doesn't Care What's in the Glass

A sour is three things: a base spirit, an acid, a sweetener, shaken hard and strained. The whiskey sour piece traced that shape back through Jerry Thomas's 1862 guide, which built it on brandy and gin, not whiskey. The format was never spirit-specific. It holds up whether the base is a barrel-aged spirit, a clear one, or, as it turns out, something that isn't technically a spirit at all.

House proportions here run the same as they did for whiskey. 2 oz base, ¾ oz acid, ¾ oz sweetener, shaken hard with ice, strained. Four of the six below follow that exactly. The other two depart from it on purpose, and each one says why.

Amaro Is Not Amaretto

Disaronno gets called an amaro often enough that it's worth settling before the recipes start. It isn't one. Amaro is Italian for bitter and covers a family of herbal digestifs, Montenegro among them. Amaretto is a different liqueur entirely, sweet and almond-flavored, and the resemblance is right there in the name: amaretto translates closer to "a little bitter," a nod to the bitter-almond character behind the flavor, even though the finished liqueur isn't bitter at all. The two words share a root; the drinks they describe don't.

Disaronno adds a wrinkle of its own. It was sold as Amaretto di Saronno until 2001, when it rebranded as Disaronno Originale and dropped the word amaretto from the label. What's in the bottle didn't change. It's still, by category, an amaretto, and Difford's Guide files it under nut liqueurs, separate from its own amaro listings.

Six Recipes

One bottle each. Where a build strays from the house ratio, it's because the bottle asked for it.

On raw egg: four of these six recipes use raw egg white for the foam. Use pasteurized whites if you're serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young, or immunocompromised, alcohol and citrus don't reliably make raw egg safe. Pasteurized whites whip nearly as well and remove the question.

1. Gin Sour

The most direct cousin of a whiskey sour there is. Thomas's 1862 book had a Gin Sour before it had anything close to a whiskey one. I like Jaisalmer Craft Indian Gin for this one because its citrus peel, lemongrass, and cubeb hold their own against the lemon rather than getting buried by it.

2. Vodka Sour

The least classic entry here, worth admitting up front. Vodka sours exist and work, they just never built the same literature the others did, because a neutral spirit brings little of its own to the glass. Vodka is vodka here. Skip anything flavored; it just fights the lemon. What you're tasting is mostly the citrus and the syrup, which is either the point or the problem depending on what you want from it.

3. Tequila Sour

Not a margarita, though it belongs to the same sour family. A margarita's defining move is orange liqueur standing in as the sweetener; drop it and the tequila itself carries the drink instead. Lime is what a tequila cocktail traditionally uses. Agave syrup is a separate call, made because tequila and agave share a plant. This build wants blanco: the unaged, peppery agave note is what the lime and egg foam are built to meet, and reposado's barrel char would just compete with it.

4. Mezcal Sour

Same build as the tequila sour, one ingredient swapped. I like El Silencio Espadín for this one. Its smoke is present but not overpowering, enough to argue with the lime without taking over. This is the closest thing on this list to what the whiskey piece was doing with peated Scotch, smoke meeting sour and neither one backing down.

5. Amaretto Sour

A widely repeated account dates the Amaretto Sour to 1974, when Amaretto di Saronno was being promoted in the United States, built as just amaretto and lemon juice, nothing else. It didn't need anything else, because amaretto already carries its own sugar. No syrup here for that reason; adding one just makes the drink cloying.

6. Amaro Sour

The real amaro, distinct from the amaretto two entries up despite the name overlap. I like Amaro Montenegro for this one. It's citrus-forward and already fairly gentle, the amaro bartenders call the gateway bottle, and it takes a sour build better than a punchier amaro like Fernet would. Amaro Nonino or Amaro Meletti work too if Montenegro isn't on your shelf, both similarly approachable, though sweeter. Difford's own Monte Sour, built specifically on Montenegro, runs 1⅔ oz amaro, ⅝ oz lemon, and just ⅓ oz of a rich 2:1 syrup, proportionally more lemon and less sugar than the house ratio below. Montenegro already carries its own sweetness, so this build pulls the syrup back from the standard ¾ oz to keep it from turning cloying; with Nonino or Meletti, taste before adding any syrup at all.

A good sour belongs to no single spirit. It belongs to balance. Change the base, and the drink takes on a different shape, but the same rules still apply: acid, sweetness, structure, and restraint. Get those right, and the spirit is just one part of what makes the sour work.