IBA
Pisco Punch – IBA
Muddle; Shake ∙ 4 min ∙ 15.9% ABV ∙
A shaken pisco punch built with pisco, pineapple and lemon juices, clove-infused sugar syrup, and a float of dry white wine, served up in a cocktail glass. Bright and tart up front, it settles into a warm, spiced sweetness, with the wine float lending a crisp, dry finish that lingers.
Ingredients
1
Servings
Instructions for 1 serving
- Pre-chill a glass
- Gently muddle Sugar syrup 15 ml with the Cloves 3 pcs
- Add: Pisco 60 mlFresh pineapple juice 22 mlLemon juice 15 ml
- Shake with ice
- Fine strain into a large goblet
- Add White wine 30 ml on top and gently stir
- Note: Can be scaled up and served from a punch bowl or a large pitcher
Tips
- Muddle the cloves into the sugar syrup gently and briefly — just enough to release their oil, not so much they turn bitter.
- Fine-strain after shaking so no clove fragments or pulp reach the glass, keeping the punch clear.
- Add the white wine on top at the very end and give it one gentle stir, as the build does - it lifts the aromatics without being shaken through the body of the punch.
- Pre-chill the glass before straining — the drink is served up with no ice, so it warms fast without a cold glass.
History
Pisco Punch – IBA is the International Bartenders Association's official specification of the Pisco Punch, added to the organization's New Era category in its 2024 update. The IBA version standardizes the drink into a shaken, single-serve build with pisco, pineapple juice, lemon juice, sugar syrup, dry white wine, and muddled cloves, giving bartenders a fixed reference recipe rather than the loosely-guarded original.
The drink it codifies traces to San Francisco's Bank Exchange Saloon, where bartender Duncan Nicol served the Pisco Punch from the 1890s until Prohibition forced the bar's closure, and famously kept his exact recipe a secret for life. Nicol's original formula was never published, so later bartenders and the IBA committee reconstructed and standardized a version decades afterward, differing mainly in using measured proportions and a fixed method rather than Nicol's closely guarded original mix.
