Message 23728 of 39188 in General Discussion

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> 
> Ah, but this is the problem. Do people really know what they want? 
> How many people make the mistake of ordering a Sour drink, and then 
> complain because it is not sugary sweet enough for them.
> 

This could be a slippery slope though.  A good tender will use some discretion 
based upon experience to give the customer what they want but words and names 
still mean things.  If you think you know better than the customer what they 
want or that your own variation is better than the standard recipe for what 
they ordered than there's no point in naming drinks, such that I can go into 
any bar and order a cocktail with a reasonable idea of what to expect.  
Certainly it's cool if you can talk to your customer and interest them in your 
own version of something but I can't condone arbitrarily swapping ingredients 
into drinks just because it suits you at that moment.  

In spite of the fact that a Whiskey Sour is (whiskey + sour) the name is still 
a title, not just a note on what elements to combine.  I haven't studied the 
origins of this cocktail and I won't claim to know all of it's variations.  
Still I would stand by the statement that most sours call for lemon juice 
(assuming we're talking about juice and not mixes) unless an exception is 
stated.  So if it's a Whiskey, Amaretto, Pisco, Midori, etc. it gets made with 
lemon juice and an appropriate amount of sugar.  Then you've got sours like 
the Sidecar and Margarita that add triple sec into the recipe and the juice is 
specific to the recipe (e.g. lime in a Margarita).  

While I could see someone making a WS with lime juice I've never seen a recipe 
for it.