Techniques
Mastering the Sour
Create beautiful, sippable clouds with these five techniques!
Egg white sours are some of the most iconic and essential cocktails to add to your repertoire. However, achieving that frothy texture can be quite tricky, especially with the physically demanding task of creating a stable and well-emulsified end result. We’re here to give you some easy tricks to help you get that perfect foam!
Before we get started, let’s show you the classic recipe using our signature Q1908!
Ready to go? JUMP to the Category:
- Give it a good, hard shake!
- Dry or reverse dry shake?
- Egg white or aquafaba?
- Use the coil from a strainer or a shaker ball!
- Garnishing your sour
1. Give it a good, hard shake! ⇩
This may seem straightforward, but the most important part of achieving that froth is the quality effort you put into your dry shake. This is where emulsification happens, which builds up that thick foam. If you’re shaking for a long time, but it’s too weak, the meringue texture won’t form that well. Just remember to keep your joints safe and maintain healthy posture to prevent injury!
2. Regular Dry or Reverse Dry Shake? ⇩
You might have heard about comparisons being made between these two styles, but what even are they? The regular dry method starts by shaking all of your ingredients without ice to incorporate air that builds up the foam followed by a wet shake – with ice to chill and dilute. As you may have guessed, the reverse dry technique swaps the order where you start shaking over ice, strain it into the other tin, and shake again without ice to end by creating that foam.
Both will yield nice results where the regular method tends to be more stable, but the ice pops most of the bubbles to create a thinner layer whereas the reverse method yields a thicker foam, but the bubbles are larger, which dissipate faster. Whichever you choose is ultimately up to personal preference!
Important to note: The dry shake creates pressure inside your tins that can end up opening prematurely, so be sure to maintain a good seal! If you hear hissing before you’re finished, you’ll want to open and reseal your tins and continue shaking.
3. Egg white or aquafaba ⇩
Egg whites are the classic foaming agent and even though they are safe to consume in cocktails, we have an alternative option if you’d rather have something different. Simply strain out the liquid from a can of chickpeas and use 1 oz per cocktail. Don’t worry, it may sound a little strange, but it won’t make your drink taste like beans!
4. Use a coil from a strainer or a shaker ball! ⇩
You don’t have to rely solely on brute force to create that foam! Take out the spring from a Hawthorne strainer or a whisk ball from a protein shaker and add it to your tins for the dry shake. This will help a lot and reduce the effort needed to create the froth, kind of like whisking a meringue!
5. Garnishing Your Sour! ⇩
Once you strain out your cocktail, give it a moment for the foam to settle before garnishing. Our favourites are dried flowers, light pieces of fruit, or drawing a fun pattern out of drops of bitters using a cocktail pick. It’s better not to go with anything too heavy so that you preserve the fluffy texture!
We hope you keep these tips in mind to help you the next time you make a sour! There’s nothing quite like the silky and fluffy texture of this type of cocktail and it’s definitely something you should be able to enjoy at home.
For more cocktail inspiration, you know where to look: check out our Instagram, Cocktail Page, or Blog!
Sip responsibly!