The sour , a short, single-serving punch-offshoot with spirits, citrus juice, and a sweetening agent, served up, is one of the most important classes of modern drinks. See punch. Indeed, many of the most popular cocktails are in fact sours. See Margarita; Daiquiri; Cosmopolitan; and Sidecar.
The sour is an American drink of the 1850s, appearing at roughly the same time as its close cousin the fix and the julep-derived smash (the sour’s first appearance in print is a casual reference in the New York Times from 1857). See fix; smash. All of these can be viewed as short adaptations of drinks traditionally served long, designed to make them quicker to consume and less intoxicating: Jerry Thomas’s individual Brandy Punch, for example, has over 200 ml of liquid, 90 of that being spirits, while his sour cuts the spirits down to 60 ml and the total volume to a little over 100. See long drink and Thomas, Jeremiah P. “Jerry”. There is, however, another, more evolutionary way of looking at the drink’s origin, as illuminated in an 1826 article from a Cincinnati newspaper on the many ways Americans took their spirits, using whisky as an example. Among the twenty-two different varieties of whisky and whisky drinks listed are “whisky sweet and sour” and “whisky sour and sweet.” This, an early instance of the American propensity for customizing one’s drinks, might have begun as an ad hoc preference when ordering a glass of punch, but by Thomas’s day each way had become its own drink. “Sweet and sour” went down the path of the fancy drink and became the fix, with fruit garnish and the only souring agent being a slice of lemon stirred in, while the “sour and sweet” became the rather more austere sour, which Thomas describes as the same as a fix but “omitting all fruits except a small piece of lemon, the juice of which must be pressed in the glass.” In any case, the sour rapidly became one of the most important classes of American drink. As the Atlanta Daily Constitution put it in 1879, “When American meets American then comes the Whisky Sour.”
The most popular spirits for sours were originally, in rough order, brandy, Santa Cruz rum, Holland gin or genever, and American whisky. See rum; Santa Cruz rum; and genever. By the 1870s, whisky had moved into first place, and would stay there. At the same time, bartenders had taken to straining the sour into a separate glass rather than serving it in the glass it was mixed in. This required the adoption of a new glass. Like the cocktail glass that was then coming into vogue, the sour glass was stemmed (to keep the hand from warming it), but it was larger—some 150 ml, versus the cocktail glass’s 90 ml—in order to accommodate the citrus juice and the water used to dissolve the sugar that went into the drink (both drinks were based on a 2-ounce, or 60-ml, jigger of spirits).
As long as they were straining the sour into its own glass, mixologists began experimenting with it in other ways both small and large, from replacing the granulated sugar with simple syrup (the most exacting ones always resisted that shortcut, preferring to stir the sugar into the juice before adding the other ingredients) or importing the fruit garnish from the fix to putting the whisky version in a large goblet and topping it off with soda water (this, basically a fizz, was known as a “Hari Kari”), or incorporating egg white into it and serving it in a sugar-rimmed glass. See
The creativity that went into the sour got diverted in the first decade of the twentieth century, when the popularity of drinks such as the Bronx made it acceptable for citrus juice to be used in a cocktail. See Bronx Cocktail. Aside from a few fossilized expressions—the Whisky Sour; the Stone Sour (with orange juice added to the lemon)—new citrus drinks served straight up were henceforth generally pulled into the cocktail category due to its increasing gravitational power as it became the stand-in in popular iconography for all mixed drinks. (As a late counterbalance, there is the whole tangled world of tiki drinks, almost every one of them a punch or a sour at heart. See tiki.)
Even worse for the sour was another development of the twentieth century, “sour mix,” a bottled (or, God help us, powdered) blend of citric acid, sugar, artificial or real lemon or lime flavor (or often both), and a foaming agent (to give the appearance of egg white). This was found occasionally in New York bars before Prohibition, was widespread after Repeal, and was nearly universal from the 1960s through the 1980s. Fortunately, in recent years such shortcuts have become unfashionable, and, in the best establishments, at least, the sour has returned to its pristine excellence.
Recipe: Stir 7 ml sugar in 15 ml lemon juice; add 60 ml spirits and (optionally) 15 ml egg white; shake, strain into large cocktail glass, and garnish with cherry and orange slice.
“Coffee.” Natchez Newspaper and Public Advertiser, November 29, 1826, 3 (from the Cincinnati Western Tiller).
McDonough, Patsy. McDonough’s Bar-Keeper’s Guide. Rochester, NY: 1883.
“Peeps behind the Political Curtain.” New York Times, June 23, 1857, 1.
“When American Meets American.” Atlanta Daily Constitution, February 20, 1879, 2.
Wondrich, David. Imbibe!, 2nd ed. New York: Perigee, 2015.
By: David Wondrich