Amaro Stone Sour

A bright, easy-drinking sour that blends amaro with orange juice and lemon for a bittersweet citrus cocktail that pleases all palates.

The Stone Sour traces to bartender Tom Bullock's 1917 book The Ideal Bartender, where Bullock — the first African American to publish a cocktail book — recorded an early version built on gin, lemon juice, orange juice, and rock candy syrup rather than whiskey. Decades later the format resurfaced as a whiskey-based drink sometimes called the California Sour; cocktail historian Dale DeGroff included both a Bourbon Stone Sour and a rye-based Stone Sour in his 2002 book The Craft of the Cocktail, noting the West Coast origin of the name without being able to pin down who coined it first. A published version also appears in Vincent Sardi and George Shea's 1988 Sardi's Bar Guide. Applying the Stone Sour template to amaro rather than whiskey produces a result that is simultaneously lighter in alcohol — most amari run between 25-35% ABV against whiskey's standard 40% — and considerably more herbally complex. The bitter liqueur replaces both the base spirit and much of the need for a separate sweetener, since amaro's sugar content performs the sweetening function while its botanicals add the complexity that whiskey's grain and barrel character provides in the original. The orange juice continues to play its moderating role, softening the amaro's bitterness in the same way it softens the whiskey's edge in the standard version.