Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - 29
Whiskey
Cocktails
by Eben Klemm
Illustrations by Paul Hoppe
Your Upstairs Bartending School with the plastic sour mix on the gun
wants you to believe that cocktails must be mastered by rote: that each
exists as its own hermetic and unrelated recipe-Amount of Ingredient X
plus Amount of Ingredient Y = Famous Cocktail Z.
This results in many of the bartenders I train-and
some of the curious civilians I serve-assuming that I
hold hundreds of cocktail recipes in my head. I don't
have time for that, not really. I can remember the
drink recipes for the menus I'm currently serving, a
couple of classic outliers (I'm looking at you, Singapore Sling) and a set of simple algorithms.
A thinking bartender remembers systems. They
plug liquors into known ratios; they insert a spirit
into a constant amount of acid and sweetener, and
only that primary spirit determines the name of the
cocktail. In other words, there's no difference in a bartender's mind between, say, a gimlet and a daiquiri
except for the bottle being grabbed off the back bar.
All well-made alcoholic beverages, whether poured
from barrel, still or shaker, seek to mask the intensity
of ethanol with a play of acid, bitter and sugar. Wine's
a gavotte; a cocktail's a slam dance. The higher ABV
essentially turns a proper drink into an arms race
with increasing levels of mixers. Where wine can be
described in terms of metaphorical fruit flavors, cock-
tails actually use fruit. Wine's tart blend of citric and
tartaric acid is replaced by actual citrus.
So. Let's explore two ancient warhorses that stare
at each other across the Mason-Dixon Line of Cocktails, also known as With or Without Citrus. On one
side, we have the combination of whiskey, bitters and
sugar that is the Whiskey Cocktail, more familiarly
known as the Old-Fashioned. On the other, there's
the Whiskey Sour, which is just an Old-Fashioned
with lemon juice. This is as binary a break as one
can find in the world of mixed drinks. Without consuming one half of this issue and a quarter of the next
on the history of mixed drinks, these beverages are
as close as we can come to a North American origin
story of cocktails.
If the simplest cocktail is alcohol obscured with
bitters and sugar, then its most straightforward division is adding acid. This is not splitting the difference
between a Sancerre and a New Zealand sauvignon
blanc; this is one ingredient dividing the cocktail
world in two.
WINE & SPIRITS
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017
Contents
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - Cover1
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - Cover2
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - 1
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - 2
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - 3
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - 4
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - Contents
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - 6
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - 7
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2017 - 8
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