Whiskey Sour

The cocktail that proves you don't need fancy ingredients. Bourbon, fresh lemon, and sugar shaken into a perfectly balanced sour. Add egg white foam for extra elegance.

The Whiskey Sour is one of the oldest and most structurally important cocktails in the American tradition, first published in Jerry Thomas's 1862 Bar-Tenders Guide — the foundational American bartending manual that established the sour as one of the canon's defining categories. Thomas's formula was simple: whiskey, lemon juice, and sugar, shaken and strained, with a cherry and orange slice garnish in the American fashion. The drink's structure — base spirit balanced against fresh citrus acid and a sweetener — is the template from which dozens of subsequent sour-format cocktails derive directly. The American bar's shift toward commercial sour mix in the mid-20th century reduced many Whiskey Sours to a synthetic, oversweetened version that damaged the drink's reputation through the 1970s and 1980s. The craft cocktail revival of the late 1990s and 2000s systematically restored the Whiskey Sour to its proper fresh-ingredient form, with Jeffrey Morgenthaler's 2012 reformulation with bourbon, fresh lemon, and egg white at Portland's Clyde Common becoming one of the era's most influential recipe publications. The IBA recognizes the Whiskey Sour as a Contemporary Classic. It remains one of the most ordered cocktails in American bars and one of the drinks most likely to reveal the skill and philosophy of the bartender preparing it.