I’m a bit torn with this one. I wouldn’t say I like this drink, but it has its place in history, and some people like it. So here it is—the ultra-sweet and synthetic Midori Sour.
This isn’t a true late 70s Suntory Midori sour. The official recipe uses a sweet and sour mix, but that garbage has no place in this kind of an app, so I replaced it with orange liqueur and lemon juice. Sweet and sour is a lousy facsimile of those two ingredients. If you were thinking of making this drink or think you like it, I would suggest checking out the two improved Midori Sour recipes. The two improved recipes retain the melon flavor but mellow it out quite a bit and add more herbal or textural complexity to the drink. I think those two are decent drinks. For this one, I took one sip and then dumped it as soon as I finished taking the pictures for it.
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This isn’t a classic cocktail. It’s just a perfect cocktail. The Midori Sour is a pretty awful drink. If you google it, you’ll find many different recipes (also trying to improve it), but the official Beam Suntory recipe is half Midori and half sweet and sour mix. It comes in around 10% ABV and tastes as bad as it sounds. This late 70s drink reeks of sweaty polyester suits at studio 54 looking to fuck.
This improved one keeps the same flavor and intent as the original but isn’t as sweet, and the herbal flavors make it much more palatable.
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A friend of mine suggested I add this cocktail, and while the stuffy pretentious drinker in me turns up its nose to modern cocktails like this, the laid-back, chill me loves drinks like this. I have no idea who first made this, they are most likely still young and still alive, but I will take a wild guess and say it was first mixed somewhere in LA. The joke is that this funky-colored drink is supposed to look like tap water in Los Angeles. I get that the joke is that the water is gross and funky, but if the tap water there tasted like this, I would move to LA and never look back. No, it’s not vintage, but it’s super good.
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Invented in the Late 19th century by D.C. lobbyist Joe Rickey (At least that’s who is credited with having invented it), the rickey is a refreshing and slightly tart cocktail. This recipe is a brandy variation of the original whiskey-based rickey. More than just a recipe, the rickey became an archetype for many popular cocktails, even if you don’t realize they are structurally a rickey. The rickey cocktail structure is simple: 1/2 ounce (15 mls) citrus, 2 oz (60 mls) base spirit, and 5 oz (150 mls) carbonated beverage. For example, the rum and coke with a lime is a rickey, Dark ‘N’ Stormy, gin, and tonic; are all based on rickey structures.
What Does The Midori Rickey Taste Like?
This isn’t a classic cocktail, but it’s damn good. I like Midori and think it’s a pretty good liqueur, but it’s used terribly. The proportions of a rickey work very for Midori, and this has a nice, mildly sweet melon flavor with just a hint of tart lemon. This goes down like a not too sweet melon soda with enough alcohol to give you a nice buzz.
Properly Adding Soda Water.
The essential ingredient in a rickey, I feel, is the soda water and how the cocktail is prepared. Of course, the spirit and citrus are the flavors you taste, but the soda water is what provides all the texture. If you prepare it to stay as bubbly as possible, you will have an outstanding cocktail. Still, if you don’t cool the ingredients or glass properly and stir it too violently, you will end up with a flat lame cocktail, similar to drinking a flat soda. Sure the flavor will be there, but it will be flat. So here is what you do. The two things you have control over are 1). the temperature, and 2). how violently you add the soda water. First, add the spirit and citrus to a glass filled with ice. Stir them together so that they get cold and the inside of the glass chills. Even better, you could chill the glass in the freezer first, but that requires forethought. Stirring with ice works well enough on the spot. Next, when you add the soda water, do it gently and only give the drink a couple of turns to mix the soda water with the spirit and citrus. Adding and stirring the soda water like this helps maintain as much carbonation as possible, and the bubblier it is, the more refreshing it will be.
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The moss head is my attempt to make an improved Midori sour because the Midori sour is not a very well-balanced drink, in my opinion. It has very little alcohol and is painfully sweet. My goal for this cocktail was to make a better Midori sour by reducing the amount of Midori, adding floral flavor to complement the melon taste, and giving the drink a bit more alcohol to level out the sweetness. It’s less one-dimensional and taste more like a regular cocktail. The egg whites also add a nice creamy texture that reminds me of those fun Korean melon milk drinks.
How To Get Egg White Right In Cocktails.
Cocktails with egg whites are difficult cocktails to get right, and anyone who says otherwise is projecting a false image. Everyone who has made a fizz has had one of these pops open on them while shaking, only to make a mess. The best advice I can pass on to making any fizz cocktail is it comes down to 2 things; Technique and chemistry. A common technique that works very well is using a dry shake. A dry shake is shaking all your ingredients together without ice first to make forming the foam easier. The foam will still form with ice, but you will work twice as hard for half the result if you shake with ice first. The first shake is only about 20-30 seconds of vigorous shaking, but this is the part that forms most of your foam. A little tip here is to wrap a kitchen towel around the seal of your shaker because no matter how strong you are or how tight your grip, it will pop open a little. As the egg whites unfold, they can expand up to 8x their original size, thus increasing the pressure inside the shaker and forcing small amounts of the sugary egg mix to squirt out. Wrapping a small towel around the shaker will catch this and keep things clean.
Next and more important is chemistry. You have to get the science right for egg whites to foam properly. Denaturing/unfolding egg protein into a meringue is more science than brawn, and a friend of mine who is a baker once gave me this advice for how she made meringue at the bakery.
Keep it room temperature.
Use an acid to help break the proteins hydrogen bonds and unfold it in addition to beating it.
Use sugar to stabilize the foam from collapsing and to form smaller bubbles.
A mistake I made for a long time was using eggs fresh from the fridge. Even if I’m doing a dry shake, I’m still starting with cold ingredients. So take the eggs out and let them come to room temperature first. Cold egg protein is much more stable and difficult to break apart than if it is at room temperature. The next tip is to use acid. Bakers will use cream of tartar as the acid helps accelerate the denaturing process along with beating it. In the cocktail, we use lemon or lime juice. It is much, much harder to form a foam without using an acid. The last bit of advice is to use sugar to stabilize the foamed protein from collapsing. A sweet liqueur alone isn’t enough. I’ve tried making fizzes with just liqueurs for sweeter alone, and they have never formed a good foam. This needs real simple syrup. If you don’t use sugar in your Fizz, what will happen is the foam will develop, but it will collapse back into the liquid just as fast, and you will be left with a thin layer of lame bubbles on top. It will still taste the same and be good, but that beautiful foam will be gone, and for these drinks, the large foam head is the garnish. The sugar makes the water “wetter” and helps keep the suspended air inside from combining into larger bubbles. This helps form a smoother micro bubble foam.
Cocktails with egg whites are some of the most elegant and sublime cocktails, but they are not the easiest to make. Eventually, you can get to a point where you can make them correctly and consistently, but it can take a while and many failed attempts. Hopefully, the tips I gave help shorten that journey. There are a lot of tips and tricks out there for making fizzes, and I tried to keep mine reasonable and realistic, but see what works for you. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and still, I have the occasional one that doesn’t foam up well, even though I make them all the same. It’s just the nature of the egg sometimes, and I accept it and make it again.
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Download The Official Vintage American Cocktails App
If you have ever struggled with a recipe or wonder why yours are not turning out like they do at the bar then check out my simple step-by-step videos. I will walk you through how to expertly build each drink so you get consistently great results.
