Amaretto Sour

Amaretto, fresh lemon, egg white, and bourbon — Jeffrey Morgenthaler's 2012 Clyde Common recipe that rescued a 1970s original ruined by bottled sour mix.

The Amaretto Sour has lived two distinct lives: a 1970s original of limited ambition, and a 2012 rehabilitation that became one of the craft cocktail movement's most cited examples of recipe reclamation. Amaretto — the Italian almond-flavored liqueur from Saronno, Lombardy — reached American bars in the early 1970s, when importers recognized that its sweet, approachable profile suited the American palate better than the bitter Italian digestivi. The original Amaretto Sour was simply amaretto with bottled sour mix, a formula that served adequately in an era when sour mix was the default citrus component in American bars. Its reputation as a low-quality, overly sweet drink solidified through the 1980s and 1990s, making it a byword for unsophisticated ordering. In 2012, Jeffrey Morgenthaler — then the bar manager at Clyde Common in Portland, Oregon, and one of the key figures of the American craft cocktail revival — published a significantly revised formula that addressed every structural weakness in the original. He replaced bottled sour mix with fresh lemon juice for genuine acid, added a measure of cask-strength bourbon to give the low-ABV amaretto a firmer spirit backbone, and included egg white for texture. The result demonstrated that the drink's poor reputation was a recipe problem rather than a concept problem, and the upgraded Amaretto Sour returned to menus across the country as a legitimately respected cocktail.