Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s Amaretto Sour

Jeffrey Morgenthaler, a bartender who worked at Clyde Common in Portland, Oregon, for many years, is the shepherd of unloved drinks. “There are no bad drinks, only bad bartenders,” he has said, and he means it. As good as his word, he has devoted his labors to rescuing déclassé drinks like the grasshopper, blue Hawaii, and Long Island iced tea. But his most successful salvage job has been the amaretto sour.

“I always liked amaretto sours,” he said. “I drank them in college sometimes. Then, when everyone started getting super serious about drinks, it just kinda got left by the wayside. I remember seeing other bartenders talk about the ‘dark days’ of cocktails, and they’d always mention the amaretto sour as an example of how terrible the drinks were back in the day.” So, around 2009, he went about improving it. His chief innovation—and the one that took the drink from tacky to terrific—was the addition of nearly an ounce of quality overproof bourbon.

He put the recipe on his popular blog around 2012. By 2014, he bravely put it on the menu at Clyde Common. But it was at Pépé le Moko, a kitschy subterranean bar that opened beneath Clyde Common in 2014, that the cocktail became a star.

“It was probably our number one seller along with the Grasshopper,” he recalled. “People seemed kinda relieved that they could go to a fancy cocktail bar and have fun drinks for once.” The drink has since become the default recipe for the amaretto sour at craft cocktail bars around the world.

Read more amaretto sour history here →

This recipe was excerpted from ‘Modern Classic Cocktails' by  Robert Simonson. Buy the full book on Amazon.