It's just delicious.

I’ve wanted to try this cocktail since seeing the “Chile” episode of Three Sheets. In the episode, Zane sits on a sunny patio in Valparaiso, Chile, swigging pisco sours with a hilariously charming Chilean wingman. The whole segment made the pisco sour look like ambrosia.

Pisco is a Muscat grape distillate. Though pisco is named for the Pisco region in Peru, I was impressed by the Chilean purity standards that to be called “pisco” the distillate must be made from Muscat grapes only and not grape stems, skins, and other additives like the common Peruvian version. Feel free to make your arguments if you have any. For the Pisco Sour, DeGroff considers:

1 1/2 ounces pisco
1 ounce simple syrup
3/4 ounce fresh squeezed lemon or lime juice (I used lemon per the Three Sheets version)
1 ounce egg white
Several drops of Angostura bitters to top the foam

A little tip: get medium eggs if you can. Any larger is just a waste of egg…unless you are making several. Even a medium egg has about 1 1/2 ounces of white. Help me out here: Would it be appropriate to use cartoned egg whites? I’m tired of separating eggs and wasting yolks. And don’t fear the salmonella. These days eggs are pretty clean and the alcohol is going to kill all the bugs anyway.

The glass for the pisco sour should be like a port glass but I wanted more room so I used the squat little wine glass I had handy. You know the ones; the heavy but tiny wine glasses you get at poorly catered affairs like company Christmas parties and Holiday Inn weddings. Like you can’t be trusted with a full glass of wine, you have to drink at the kid’s table.

It’s frosty and foamy, sweet and sour. Not tart, but sour. Okay I admit that I don’t know if there is a difference. To me, “tart” describes a sharper, more acidic taste. Maybe it’s the hard consonants at the fore and aft of the tiny little word “tart”. You know a word is serious if half of the letters are the same. Maybe that’s why those Scandinavian languages always sound so severe. “Sour” denotes more of a languid flavor to me. If it’s the opposite for you, just take my meaning and swap the words.

This is a delicious drink. I get a little bit of the wineyness of the pisco. The bitters resting on top of the foam makes for an interesting olfactory experience, just different enough from the taste to take you somewhere. I don’t know if it takes you to Chile, but somewhere. This also just steps over the line from “Hey that’s not a cocktail, that’s just a delicious little lemonade” and into “Damn, I may get snotflingin’ drunk from these.” Hmm. I might have to have another one of those to be sure. The top stays foamy and creamy, but unfortunately a lot of it stays behind in the mixing glass because of the strainer. It is certainly a better use of a raw egg white than the Ramos Fizz (sorry Linda). Usually when I’m cocktailing, I like to have a couple of different drinks. But the depth of flavor in the Pisco Sour suggests you could just have these all day. Each sip makes me say “Well that’s different.”

Mastered the Boston rig. I was scared to really whack down on the glass for a tight seal but that’s what it takes. It’s early to grade the drinks but this is my favorite so far. 2 out of 100 drinks suggests I’ve got a ways to go.

Chileans I have known: I’ve had their sea bass, does that count?

Let's hear it for autumn!

Bonus

The rain is about to roll in Los Angeles (finally) and I am happy to be able to cook up some cool-weather grub. Considering the pisco sour from Chile, why not a big vat of my chili? It went perfectly with the pisco sour. If you want the recipe, just ask.

Special word for this post: Cocktailing
Why?: It’s fun to verbify nouns (sometimes I actually hate it…I mean really, “journaling”? Just say you were writing in your journal, you doofus.)