Continental Sour
Dry shake ∙ 5 min ∙ 16.6% ABV ∙
The Continental Sour is a bourbon whiskey sour built with lemon juice, sugar syrup, egg white, and a bitters dash, finished with a tawny port float. Silky and citrus-bright from the egg white foam, with warm bourbon underneath and a dark, raisined port note settling on the finish.
Ingredients
1
Servings
Instructions for 1 serving
- Pre-chill a glass
- Shake the first 5 ingredients with ice: Bourbon 60 mlLemon juice 30 mlSugar syrup 15 mlAngostura aromatic bitters 1 dashEgg white 15 ml
- Strain back into the shaker
- Dry shake (without ice) to emulsify
- Fine strain into the ice-filled glass
- Drizzle Tawny port 10 ml over the surface of the cocktail
Tips
- Dry shake the bourbon, lemon juice, syrup, bitters, and egg white without ice for 15 seconds first to build a stable foam before adding ice.
- After the dry shake, add ice and shake hard again for 15 seconds to properly chill and dilute; this double shake is essential for a silky egg-white texture.
- Float the tawny port gently over the finished drink by pouring over the back of a spoon so it sits on top rather than mixing in.
- Strain over one large ice cube in the old-fashioned glass to keep dilution slow while the port streaks visibly through the foam.
History
The Continental Sour is built on the Whiskey Sour, a drink whose earliest documented mention appeared in a Wisconsin newspaper, the Waukesha Plain Dealer, in 1870, the broader sour formula having been codified earlier in Jerry Thomas's 1862 Bartender's Guide; a separate account credits a former ship steward named Elliott Stubb with mixing a whisky sour in Iquique, Peru, in 1872. The idea of floating red wine on top of the sour is traced to a Chicago bartender interviewed in the Washington Star's "Life in Chicago" column in 1883, who claimed the "claret flourish" originated at his bar. Before settling on its now-familiar name, New York Sour, this red-wine-topped version circulated under several names in the late 1800s, among them Continental Sour, Southern Whiskey Sour, Brunswick Sour, and Claret Snap. The Continental Sour name was revived in its own right around 2010 at the Stagger Lee bar in Berlin, where the bartenders swapped the traditional red wine float for port, giving the drink its current identity as a port-topped riff on the Whiskey Sour.
