Episode 53: Amaretto Sour

  • 2 oz. Amaretto

  • 1 oz. Fresh lemon juice

  • ½ of a fresh large egg white (or ½ oz of Pasteurized egg whites if you prefer)

  • Garnish: Good quality cocktail Cherries and a few dashes of Angostura bitters

Combine all of the ingredients in a shaker and “dry” shake without ice for 5 seconds. Add ice and shake again for 15 seconds. Strain into a chilled rocks glass filled with ice and garnish.

No-one knows for sure who first came up with the recipe for the Amaretto Sour, but we do know that it was created somewhere in the USA, sometime in the 1970s, when Italian liquors were starting to become fashionable in America.

Italians had been trying to introduce their spirits to an American audience for years, but it seemed that the bitterness of many Italian spirits was too much for most Americans in the 70s, who preferred their alcohol on the sweet side. Campari and the Negroni cocktail, for example, had a really hard time squeezing into the American market, but thankfully for Italy, Americans found the sweet nutty flavor of Amaretto to be very easy to drink.

 Amaretto (Italian for "a little bitter) is a sweet, slightly bitter, almond flavored liqueur traditionally made by soaking apricot kernels in brandy. Today it can also be made with peach stones, sweet almonds, or bitter almonds.

While we don’t know who or where or when the amaretto sour was invented, we do know that in the 70s the recipe would have been as simple as mixing amaretto with ready mixed bar sour mix. Such a simple recipe could have come from anywhere and it’s highly likely that multiple bars started selling them independently of one another and the popularity spread until they were ubiquitous in the 1980s. They remained popular in the 90s but eventually fell out of favor. Today though, they’re actually starting to make a bit of a comeback, but most of the new-fangled recipes that bars are serving today mix the amaretto with whiskey to increase the alcohol content and balance the sweetness. The recipe above contains only amaretto, but instead of sour mix, it calls for fresh lemon juice and egg white. Since amaretto is sweet enough on its own, no sour mix is necessary.

Episode 48: the Pink Squirrel

  • 1 oz White Crème de Cacao

  • 1 oz Crème de Noyaux

  • 2 oz Heavy cream

  • Freshly grated nutmeg for garnish

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker with plenty of ice. Shake until frosty and strain into a chilled coupe glass. Garnish with freshly grated nutmeg.

In the 1970s, cream-based cocktails were taking the country by storm. There was the white Russian, the Brandy Alexander, the Grasshopper, the Golden Cadillac, and of course, the Pink Squirrel.

This sweet and creamy cocktail is made with heavy cream, white crème de cacao, and a deep red French almond flavored liqueur called Crème de Noyaux which gives the cocktail a delicate pale pink color when combined with the heavy cream. Invented in the 1940s by Bryant Sharp at Bryant's Cocktail Lounge in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, it may have originally called for ice cream rather than heavy cream. In the 50’s it was often served at Wisconsin supper clubs, old-school restaurants best known for their meat-and-potato prix fixe menus. These supper clubs were also known for serving boozy milkshake cocktails, so the Pink Squirrel fit right in.

In the 60s though, heavy cream was swapped for the ice cream, and that’s when the Pink Squirrel made it out of Wisconsin and into bars across the country. By the 70s, it was everywhere, and it stayed popular through the 90s. The cocktail was mentioned by name in the 1988 Tom Cruise movie Cocktail, and in several 1990s sitcoms, like Roseanne, Ellen, & The Nanny.

Eventually, the Pink Squirrel faded into obscurity but today it’s actually having a bit of a resurgence in young hip bars across the country. When asked about the Pink Squirrel, the bar manager at Xanadu, the rooftop bar at the McCarren Hotel in Williamsburg Brooklyn, said, "Being in New York at the time of this Prohibition revival was great, and it was great to enjoy these beautiful classic cocktails of that era, but now it's fun to enjoy these cool drinks that were popular in the 70s and 80s. The Pink Squirrel is sort of one of those cocktails that our mothers drank when they were in college. It's one of those late-70s, trendy cocktails that people were drinking in New York especially."

Episode 33: The Sex on the Beach

  • 2 ounces vodka

  • 1/2 ounce peach schnapps

  • 1 1/2 ounces orange juice

  • 1 1/2 ounces cranberry juice

  • Ice

  • Optional Garnish: Orange slice, maraschino cherry, cocktail umbrella  

Fill a hurricane glass or a large highball glass with ice. Pour vodka, schnapps, & orange juice over the ice, and then slowly & carefully top with cranberry juice for a layered effect. Garnish with an orange slice, a maraschino cherry, and a cocktail umbrella. Serve with a straw to stir the drink together.

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By the 1980s, American cocktail culture had lost it’s way a bit. We’d moved as far as possible from the carefully crafted, well balanced cocktails of the past and replaced them with anything and everything sweet, fruity, colorful, and easy to make. If you could taste the alcohol, you were doing it wrong.

Vodka was especially popular in the 80s, as was orange juice (boxed not fresh), along with fruity flavored liqueurs, tropical flavors, bright colors, layered cocktails and shots, and drinks with sexy names.

When it comes to typical cocktails of the 1980s, the Sex on the Beach has it all!

As for the drink’s history, one origin story claims that a bartender named Ted invented the drink in 1987 at a Florida bar called Confetti’s. He says he was challenged to a peach schnapps sales contest and invented the sex on the beach to appeal to spring breakers. Unfortunately for this story, the recipe had appeared in print in 1982, 5 years before Ted claimed to have “invented” it.

The more likely origin story is that a bartender simply combined the Fuzzy Navel (made with orange juice and peach schnapps) and a Cape Codder (made with vodka and cranberry juice) into one fruity concoction.

Either way, people loved a sexy name, and when TGI Friday’s added the drink to their cocktail menu, it reached 80s cult cocktail status.

There are several variations on this cocktail. Some people add Chambord berry flavored liqueur. Some add pineapple juice. Some recipes even replace the cranberry juice with grenadine. This version is by far the most common and popular though.

Episode 30: The White Russian

  • 2 oz vodka

  • 2 oz khalua

  • 2 oz light cream or half & half

Pour vodka and khalua over ice in a rocks glass & stir. Gently pour the cream over the top. You can stir in the cream to combine everything, but I think it looks nicer if you keep the layer of cream separate on top and let the drinker stir it together themselves.

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The recipe for the White Russian first appeared in print in the Oakland Tribune in 1965. The recipe was simple, it called for, “1oz. each Southern, vodka, cream”. “Southern” was short for “Coffee Southern”, which was a popular brand of coffee liqueur that used to be made by Southern Comfort. It’s not around anymore so most people use Khalua today.

The funny thing about the name of the White Russian is that the recipe doesn’t come from Russia and there’s nothing particularly Russian about it. It turns out though, that before the 1950s, vodka wasn’t very popular in the US, and at one point it was considered a strange, foreign spirit that was only consumed in Russia. When people outside Russia first started drinking it, they gave vodka based cocktails names that had the word Russia in them, or at least a nod to Russia, like the Moscow Mule.

It took a few years after the recipe was first published to really take off, but by the 70s, the White Russian was everywhere. It’s strong, easy to make, and easy to drink, and people in the 70s loved it. After the 70s though, popularity fizzled and it almost disappeared until 1998 when The Big Lebowski came out and made it popular again.