Sidecar: Philip Greene

Somebody Finally Wrote a Cocktail Book Dedicated to the Category of Sours!

The cover of the new book Sours.

In the wake of the cocktail book bonanza of the last decade, it can seem like we’ve got all bases covered, subject-wise. Whatever nichey mixology topic you’re interested in, rest assured: there’s a book for that. Maybe even two.

There are books about gin mixology, agave mixology, whiskey mixology and vodka mixology. There are books about frozen drinks, tiki drinks and highballs. There are books solely devoted to the Old-Fashioned, Manhattan, Negroni and Margarita. There are several about the Martini! The are books dedicated to high-tech potions and ones devoted to drinks with only three-ingredients. There are books that capture the house recipes of dozens of different famous cocktail bars.

Cocktail writer Philip Greene, however, has miraculously found a hole in this blanket coverage. His new book, Sours, takes a look at one of the oldest and most ubiquitous cocktail categories out there—drinks with juice in them—a genre that has somehow never received the book treatment.

Do you need a book just about Sours? Well, I don’t know. Do you like Margaritas? Cosmos? Daiquiris? Chances are one of your favorite drinks is a Sour; you just don’t think of it that way. Greene’s book has recipes for those classics and more, as well as plenty of original cocktails of recent vintage, all served up with a dollop of history and his usual entertaining writing style.

We caught up with Greene recently to talk about all things Sours. The conversation is below.

The Mix: How did the idea for this book come about?

Philip Greene: The short answer is that my agent and I were brainstorming about book ideas, and I’ve presented some pretty fun cocktails seminars over the years on the topic of Sours, and we thought it was worthy of a book proposal. But it’s a topic that I’ve been fascinated with for more than 20 years.

See, way back in 2004, I attended the Tales of the Cocktail festival in New Orleans for the first time, and in particular I went to a seminar by the legendary Audrey Saunders, who would later go on to run the iconic Pegu Club in Manhattan, which launched so many great bartenders. Anyway, Audrey had this whiteboard (pre-PPT, I guess!) where she charted out all the great drinks that are based on the Sour formula. She was like, “Here’s a Daiquiri. OK, swap out the rum for Tequila, and sub in an orange liqueur for the simple, and wham, it’s now a Margarita. Or take that Daiquiri, add ice, mint and seltzer water, now it’s a Mojito. Do something similar with a basic gin sour, sans mint, and it’s a Tom Collins, or it’s a Gin Fizz, depending on whether it’s served up or on the rocks. Or take that Gin Sour and top it with Champagne and it’s the classic French 75. Or take that basic Daiquiri again, use two types of rum and two types of sweeteners, and it’s the Mai Tai. The list goes on and on.”

My mind was pretty well blown. But it’s true, go into any good craft cocktail bar and you’ll see some of the classics, but also original riffs on the classics, meaning that the category is pretty much limitless. Pair something strong with something sweet and something sour, maybe add some additional ingredients (the Jungle Bird takes the Daiquiri, adds pineapple juice and Campari, and makes a new modern classic), and you’re on to something. I simply felt that it was a category of drinks that demanded a somewhat deeper dive, both from an historical and practical perspective, a compendium of classics and modern classics, and a healthy number of drinks you’ve never heard of that are worthy of your attention.

The Mix: It seems such a natural idea for a cocktail book, yet a book about Sours has never been done before now. Why do you think that is?

PG: Because you and I never thought of it previously? Seriously, that’s a good question. I mean, after all, in his iconic 1948 book The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, David Embury gave us his list of the “six basic drinks,” something of a Mount Rushmore of cocktails. And three of them are Sours! You’ve got the Manhattan, the Martini, and the Old Fashioned, then you’ve got the Daiquiri, Jack Rose and Sidecar, the latter three being Sours. (Between you and me, I wonder why the Jack Rose is there and not the Whiskey Sour.) That tells you the prominent role that the category plays in the pantheon of bartending.

And while it can be tricky for a home bartender (or a pro, for that matter) to master the right formula, in terms of balancing the sweet, sour and strong, once it’s mastered it can serve as a platform for inventing drinks of your own, or, as Embury called it, “rolling your own.” But why has it never been a stand-alone book? Who knows? I know that other books have touched on the platform, such as Dale DeGroff’s essential Craft of the Cocktail, Gary Regan’s The Joy of Mixology, Alex Day’s Cocktail Codex, Dave Arnold’s Liquid Intelligence: The Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail, your 3-Ingredient Cocktails, of course, and others, I felt it was worthy of a standalone book, and thankfully, my publisher, Union Square, agreed with me.

Author Philip Greene.

The Mix: How did you decide how to structure the book?

PG: That’s a good question. Since it’s my fifth book, I have a little experience with this sort of thing, so I had some examples to fall back on. With the Hemingway and Paris books (To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion, and A Drinkable Feast: A Cocktail Companion to 1920s Paris), it was alphabetically arranged by drink, with as much background, biography, history, literary excerpts, etc., as I could fit in there for each drink.

I decided, however, that this book should be more like my book The Manhattan: The Story of the First Modern Cocktail. See, that book was somewhat similar, since both books are an examination of a “cocktail trinity,” meaning a combination of three ingredients as the platform, and all of the drinks that flow from that trinity. With the Manhattan, it’s a combination of spirit, vermouth, and bitters. With the Sour, it’s sweet, sour and strong. With both books, I wanted to initially delve into how and under what circumstances the marriage took place. For the Manhattan, it was the introduction of vermouth in the mid-19th century that was the catalyst. Some bartender, probably in New York City, likely looked at the Old Fashioned and said “let’s try this new eye-talian vermouth stuff in place of the sugar and see what happens.” Further, the Manhattan has several “creation stories” that I wanted to address. So, the first one-third of the Manhattan book dealt with history, then it got into recipes. I thought I’d do it the same way with this one, since both topics, the Manhattan and the Sour, have a ton of history and folklore leading up to the creation of the actual drink. And if you’re not interested in such things, you can skip right to the recipes.

For the Sour, you have to go all the way back to the 17th century, when punch was invented by British colonists in East India. So, getting back to your question, I decided to structure it with an examination of the role played by citrus in drinks, a short history of punch, a wave-top discussion of the evolution of communal drinking (fathoming a punch bowl over a long evening) to the idea of individualized drinks, the birth of the cocktail (spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters), then the creation of, as David Wondrich calls it, “punch on a small plan,” namely, the Sour.

The Mix: What is the most surprising thing you learned in your research?

PG: Not being a professional bartender, I learned a ton about new trends in bartending that are found in and around the creation of Sours. I discovered new (to me) ingredients like aquafaba (the liquid found in a can of chickpeas is a great substitute for egg white in drinks like the Pisco Sour, to bring about that mouthfeel and foaming effect), pea-flower powder (the fact that it’s pH activated, it can change the color of a drink!), and things like oleo citrate, aka “Super Juice,” where bartenders like Nickle Morris in Louisville came up with a way to not only increase the yield from the fruit, but also increase its stability and shelf life, by making use of the outer layer of the peel. I learned about similar secret trick used by Havana bartender Constante Ribailagua which made his Daiquiris legendary (he’d boil the lime hulls after juicing them, creating a concentrated lime oil he’d dash into his many Daiquiri variations).

I also learned about juices I’d never heard of before, like yuzu, sudachi, kabosu, calamansi, kaffir limes, fingerling limes, and loquat juice. Then you’ve got things like hydrosols and aromatic mists, super-concentrated flavor compounds made from the distillation of the essential oils of a given plant, flower, or other botanical offering, that bartenders are using in drinks today. Lastly, I learned about any number of commercial juice offerings that are available today, which make it so much easier to make Sours for a crowd or to take on vacation where you’re likely to be making a lot of drinks.

An illustration from Sours.

The Mix: What is the most underrated Sour cocktail?

PG: That’s a tough question, but one drink that I serve often to friends and guests would be the Southside, which is essentially a gin sour with mint. Think of it like a gin Mojito but without the seltzer water (which of course you could add if you wanted to make a tall drink). And, like any great drink, it has some fun backstories that are of dubious authenticity.

The Mix: What is the Sour that is easiest to screw up?

PG: Any number of cocktail writers, Embury among them, will tell you it’s the Sidecar, where you’re really going to be disappointed with the drink if the balance is off. I cannot argue with that. Another one might be the Bees’ Knees, where you’ve really got to make sure you’ve made your honey syrup correctly (honey doesn’t cooperate as easily as sugar when it comes to dissolving). You might notice my punctuation, “Bees’ Knees,” I try to be faithful to how the creator of the drink, Frank Meier, head bartender of the Paris Ritz from 1921 through to the end of World War II, spelled it. Unfortunately, I lost the battle with my copyeditor over it; they insisted I depict it as “Bee’s Knees,” since, after all, that’s how everyone has done it for decades. Ugh, just because everyone has it wrong, I have to join them?

The Mix: What is your favorite Sour, and why?

PG: It might be a tie, one is the Jungle Bird, which I discovered in Stockholm, Sweden, in the fall of 2014 when one of our daughters was studying abroad there. I love the backstory how my good friend Jeff “Beachbum” Berry found it in an obscure cocktail book in the bargain bin of a bookstore, saw an aperitif (Campari) in a tiki drink, and was intrigued. I love that drink. The other one is a creation of my own, the Lion of Baltimore. It’s basically a Daiquiri meets a dark rum Manhattan, but with orgeat as the sweetener and some of my friend and mentor Dale DeGroff’s pimento bitters. I invented it after sailing with my dad on Chesapeake Bay circa 2013, and named it for an American fighting ship during the War of 1812 which was sunk by the British in the waters near where we keep our sailboat.

An illustration from Sours.

The Mix: We all know we should use freshly squeezed juice in a cocktail. What’s the second biggest rule of thumb when it comes to making Sours?

PG: I think it’s all about the balance, just recognizing that formula of 1½-2 ounces of spirit, and something around ½ ounce of sweet and sour, and fine-tuning it to the taste of your guest. My wife, for example, doesn’t want it to be too sweet; in fact, her favorite summertime drink is the Gin Rickey, which isn’t even a sour because it has no sweet component!

The Mix: Among modern cocktail bartenders, are there any Masters of the Sour in your opinion?

PG: In my book, and it’s likely something I should have mentioned in the “what did you discover?” question, above, I have any number of what I call “21st-Century Smashes,” and that’s a category created by Dale DeGroff in the mid-1990s. If you look at Jerry Thomas’ iconic 1862 book, The Bar-Tender’s Guide (also going by the title How to Mix Drinks: The Bon-Vivant’s Companion), he had a drink called the Smash, which was simply a “Mint Julep on a small plan.” Well, Dale had been working with legendary restauranteur Joe Baum at Aurora in Manhattan, and decided that a new spin on a classic was in order. “I thought the julep could use some help,” DeGroff told me, “especially the Thomas Smash version ‘on a small plan.’ Bourbon, sugar and water didn’t float my boat.” So, he not only made one simple addition to the ingredients, lemon, he also took a quite literal approach to the category’s name. Indeed, he took the classic “small plan” Mint Julep, picked up his muddler and “smashed” some lemon wedges along with sugar and the mint. He added ice and the bourbon, and shook it well, then strained it over crushed ice. A star was born. He not only created a delicious new cocktail, he launched a whole new category of drinks, which I’ve taken the liberty of calling the 21st Century Smash. Before long, bartenders all over the world would be smashing their own variations.

So my book has any number of 21st Century Smashes from some of today’s best bartenders, notably Jackson Cannon, H. Joseph Ehrmann, Audrey Saunders, Jason Kosmas, Dushan Zaric, Sam Ross, Vincenzo Errico, Jeorg Meyer, Nick Jarrett, Abby Gullo, Martin Cate, Toby Maloney, Phil Ward, Justin McKenzie, Naren Young, Deke Dunn, Marco Dionysos, Jillian Vose, Charlotte Voisey, Frank Caiafa, and so many others.

Meanwhile you’ve got bartenders like Jeffrey Morgenthaler reinventing the classics of yesterday like the Amaretto Sour by adding bourbon to it, and you look at some of the great drinks being made by Shannon Mustipher, Julie Reiner, Giuseppe González, and so many others. You’re going to get me in trouble, I cannot…

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The Lion of Baltimore

Philip Greene, 2013.

• 2 ounces Jamaican dark rum (such as Smith & Cross or Appleton)

• 1 ounce sweet vermouth (Dolin or Martini work well)

• 3⁄4 ounce fresh lime juice

• 1⁄4 ounce orgeat

• 2 or 3 dashes Dale DeGroff’s pimento bitters

Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake well and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

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Odds and Ends…

Bruce Joseph, who joined Anchor Brewing Company 45 years ago, has retired. He assumed the position of Master Distiller Emeritus and distillery consultant for San Francisco’s distillery, Hotaling & Co., beginning February 13… The Silver Dollar in Louisville will transform itself into a month-long tiki pop-up called The Sand Dollar from Feb. 25 through March 6. Drinks include a Hemingway Daiquiri, Rye Tai (Rye Whisky blend, rum, orgeat, lime) and Big Green Daiquiri (Midori, rum, Chartreuse, lime)… The Peerless Distilling Company in Louisville has released its new Toasted Rye whiskey bottling. The juice is aged in two separate oak barrels. It is initially aged in a char-level-3 barrel and then transferred to a toasted barrel… Danny Meyer has opened his rooftop Time Square restaurant and bar, called The View. The location is familiar to any regular theatergoer of the past 40 years. It’s the 48th floor of the Marriott Marquis Hotel at 1535 Broadway. Cocktails include a Gin Martini made with Ford’s Gin and a Manhattan made with Jaywalk Rye. The dinner menu leans toward classic steak house fare… Romeo’s, the East Village cocktail bar, will for the next three months feature a Weenie & Tini special. For $20, you get a Basil Martini (Ford’s gin, Centerbe genepy, blanc vermouth, toasted almond) and a Dye Hot Dog (topped with vodka sauce, mozzarella and pesto)… Chris Moore, most recently the beverage director at The Ned, is now at Crane Club Restaurant in West Chelsea. He is back behind the bar full-time for the first time in 10 years… A collection of never-before-seen items belonging to writer Joan Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, are now accessible to researchers at the New York Public Library. The library acquired the archive in 2023 and spent the last two years processing the material… Beefeater gin has introduced into the Spanish market a new product, Beefeater Black. The gin sports the same botanical mix as regular Beefeater, with the addition of lemon verbena and thyme… The Cafe in Louisville sells a Hot Brown Bloody Mary, meant to mock the flavors of the local casserole delicacy known as the Hot Brown. It is composed of vodka, sliced tomato, pepper jack cheese, peppered bacon, and seasoning salt… Nieman Marcus, the Dallas-based department store, is closing its historical flagship store in downtown Dallas after failing to reach an agreement with its landlord. The department store has been at the location for 111 years. The last day of business is March 31… Bartender Damon Boelte will launch a limited, seasonal edition of his own Buddha’s Hand Bitters in the coming week. Boelte developed the bitters while he was bar director of Prime Meats in Brooklyn in the late aughts. The product is called King Floyd’s Buddha’s Hand Bitters… Leyenda, the Brooklyn bar, is bringing back some of its former bartenders for its last month of business at its current location. On Tuesday, Feb. 25, from 6-10, Alisha Neverson will bartend… Strange Delight, the bar in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, will hold a Mardi Gras party on Fat Tuesday, March 4. There will be gumbo, po-boys, Hurricanes and King Cake!… The controversial history of the Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn will be revisited on Feb. 28 when a screening of the new documentary Battle for Brooklyn will be held at Pioneer Works in Red Hook. Relive how much Brooklyn hated developer Forest City Ratner in the aughts!… Fernando’s Focacceria, a longstanding Sicilian restaurant in Brooklyn that was founded in 1904, has closed its doors. This restaurant was very important to us here at The Mix and I will post a more lengthy appreciation of it on Friday.