Message 23730 of 39188 in General Discussion

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I'm sorry to reply all over the place but I end up reading another of your 
posts and the discussion continues!  

> 
> Well, with the Pisco Sour we have the exception to the rule, but is 
> there really a rule to begin with? Yes, we all know that personally 
> we have been taught to use lemon juice in a sour, but why? Shouldn't 
> each cocktail we make have a certain balance/ Harmony/ Dynamic. And 
> this I don't feel is best served by blindly dumping lemon juice in 
> every drink with the name sour on it. The spirit itself, and the 
> characteristics of that spirit, should dictate which sour is used. 
> 
I remember you mentioning limes in a Pisco Sour before.  I'm not well versed 
with this cocktail so I can't argue the point but the recipes I've seen for it 
call for lemon juice.  I used to have a roommate whose parents were Peruvian 
and I thought he also mentioned lemons but it's not like he drank them very 
often so maybe he just didn't know.  

I previously wrote that it was my understanding that lemon juice was the 
default for a XXX Sour but I can appreciate what you're saying here.  Of 
course I strive to find a compelling balance of flavor in each of my cocktails 
and am not interested in just dumping ingredients together by rote.  Perhaps 
lemon juice is the standard because it's so widely available and is pretty 
consistent in flavor and acidity.  In a lot of cases I think the old recipes 
worked it out for us, lime juice goes much better with tequila than lemon and 
hence lime is the fresh ingreident in a Margarita, a slight variation of a 
Tequila Sour.  


> Now I am not saying that I would sell a bourbon & passionfruit 
> cocktail as a "Whisky Sour", but in my opinion passionfruit works 
> better with bourbon than with  lemon or lime juice. 

I'd love to try it, I don't think I've ever had passionfruit juice in a pure 
form.  I wouldn't have guessed that it was all that acidic, but now I'll keep 
my eyes open for finding some.  Still, that's something that hardly any bar is 
going to carry, you'd definitely have the market cornered on Whiskey Passions 
if you were in my city.