5. A Winter for Drinking Sours
How to make a classic daiquiri and push for fair representation.
Hi all,
Welcome (back) to Ideas Over Drinks! Two weeks ago, I wrote about bar tools I think are worth having at home, and today I’m going to share a few notes about one of the need-to-know classic cocktail families: the sour.
What’s your favorite ______?
Fill in the blank with whatever you want to talk about, and it’s a fun question to ask just about anyone. But it’s also a pretty unfair question. Say you ask someone what their favorite cocktail is. It assumes that the person that you’re talking to 1) likes cocktails, and 2) has a single favorite that wins out over all the rest. And favorites depend on the context of a moment, as well as a history. If I’m feeling overly nostalgic (confession: the pandemic has me feeling this way a lot), I may tell you that the best cocktail I ever had was a warm shot of Tanqueray that I chased with a Molson Ice in a Toronto hotel room when I was 19 years old. I’d be wrong, of course, but who would you be to tell me that?
I prefer to be asked, What are your top 5? Ever since I saw the film version of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, starring John Cusack as a woe-is-me record store owner and a young Jack Black as his hilarious and opinionated-on-all-things-music employee, “What are your top 5?” has seemed like not only a fairer question (especially for indecisive folks like me), but also one that allowed for a more dynamic answer.
Alright then, top five, all-time, desert-island classic cocktails, go.
Here are mine, on this cold day in December of 2020, in no particular order: Daquiri, Whiskey Sour, Old Fashioned, Negroni, Black Manhattan. Two out of the five of these are in the sour family. There’s a reason for that. Because when it comes to a drink that just brings it with layers of flavor, you cannot beat a well-made sour. It’s called a sour, but of course it’s actually sour and sweet, and depending on the base spirit, there could be countless levels of additional flavors and aromatics, from herbaceous to medicinal to smoky and beyond.
Gary Regan, in his extremely thorough but definitely dated book, The Joy of Mixology, defines a sour like this:
Sours contain a base liquor, lime or lemon juice, and a non-alcoholic sweetening agent, such as simple syrup, grenadine, or pineapple juice. If the base of a sour is a liqueur, no additional sweetening agent is required.
And here’s the quick history: sours came from punches. They got their start from the British Navy in the 1600s. Sailors couldn’t preserve beer on long voyages back then (IPAs weren’t a thing), but they could get rum all throughout the Caribbean. Simon Difford claims that these sailors took rum and mixed it with lime juice in order to combat scurvy and malnutrition, and while this logic is akin to me saying I’m going to eat pizza all day long so I can get my vegetables in the form of tomato sauce, that was the origin of a Daquiri-like mixture known as Grog. (Drink too many and they’ll make you groggy, har, har. Also, eating pizza all day long sounds delightful. If only my stomach could get on board with that desire.)
The first recipe for a sour appeared in 1862, in The Bartender’s Guide by Jerry Thomas, whom many in the bartending world think of as “the father of modern mixology.” I guess we could call him that, but that brings to light the fact that we have some Daddy Issues in the bartending world. And in the world at large. It’s called the patriarchy.
Related side note: I once worked at a bar where the head bartender put a barrel-aged cocktail on the menu and named it Daddy Issues, and even though I can’t for the life of me remember what was in it other than blended scotch, I remember it being phenomenal.
Speaking of phenomenal, let’s make a daiquiri. It follows the same general formula that all sours follow: 2 oz. base spirit, ¾ oz. citrus, ½ oz. simple syrup.
Daiquiri
Ingredients:
2 oz. Rhum J.M Gold
¾ oz. fresh squeezed lime juice
½ oz. Turbinado simple syrup
Lime wheel garnish
Directions:
Combine ingredients in a mixing glass or tin, bottom to top.
Fill the glass 2/3 full with ice, cover with a tin, shake for 10-12 seconds.
Double-strain into a chilled coupe.
Garnish with the lime wheel. Drink and be transported to an eternal summer.
Notes:
As in all sours, the amount of citrus and simple syrup can be bumped up or down to your taste. Many bartenders would put the sour ratio at 2 : ¾ : ¾ oz. (spirit : citrus : sugar), and still others would put it at 2 : 1 : ½. Play around with it, and find the balance that works for you.
The simple syrup, which I showed how to make in an earlier subscriber post about the Old Fashioned, is just a 1:1 ratio of sugar to water. The quick version: simmer it on the stove, lower the heat, and stir until all the sugar is dissolved. As is the case with an Old Fashioned, turbinado sugar also plays well with a rum like Rhum J.M Gold from Martinique, which is fermented from sugarcane and is what I’m using here.
Rhum J.M will run you about $35 a bottle, but it is a fantastic bottle of rum. It has this sweet vanilla funk thing going on, with a finish that extends for miles. Aged for a year in bourbon barrels, Rhum J.M Gold is to Bacardi to what Intelligentsia coffee is to Folgers. Sorry if that sounds snobbish (especially if you love Folgers), but it’s true.
Double-straining with a tea strainer is important in order to make sure you don’t get a bunch of small ice crystals in your drink, which will tickle your lips and overdilute your cocktail. No bueno.
A quick shout-out to the vodka drinkers: as you may already know, if you swap out the rum for vodka in the above recipe, you have a vodka gimlet. Gimlets are great. I myself will take gin over vodka any day of the week, but that’s just me, and this is a debate for another time.
Final notes that have (almost) nothing to do daiquiris
Did you all know that Hulu did a reboot of High Fidelity earlier this year, starring Zoe Kravitz as the lead character? But then they cancelled it after just one season! WTF?! I just found this out, and I was so pumped to see a Black woman playing the character of Rob Fleming. But now I’m bummed that we only get a single season. An Esquire article lamenting the show’s cancellation talks about how “to cast a woman of color in this familiar, dudely trope is to create something new entirely,” before posing a great question that points to the lack of racial and gender equality that’s still obvious in film and on TV: “When do women on television ever get to be assholes, as Kravitz so deliciously and so vulnerably does on High Fidelity?”
Representation matters. Just as viewers should pressure networks and production companies to put more women of color in dynamic and powerful roles, we should do the same to restaurants and bars, when we finally emerge from this pandemic. More to come on this, as always, but for now I’ll implore you to check out the rockstar southern bartender Tiffanie Barriere, who weaves racial justice history and drink education together in a gorgeous tapestry that we could all learn from.
Finally, for real this time
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Thanks so much for considering. And thanks to everyone who read last week’s subscriber email about my migraines. I have a bit of a vulnerability hangover from that one, but hey, it’s out there.
I hope you’re finding a way to enjoy this chaotic year’s holiday season safely, with love and maybe a few libations.
Cheers!
J.