The 1919 Sour is a fantastic little cocktail. Not well known and easily made with little or no alcohol. If that’s what you’re looking for, it’s a grown up drink with a distinctive aperitivo flavour. It looks amazing too.
Where does the name 1919 Sour come from?
I came across this cocktail while travelling. I was working away. In the UK, so not some exotic far flung foreign land where drinks are different. I was eating in a local restaurant and I always have a look through the cocktail menu. I’m always keen to try new concoctions. Always on the lookout for the next great cocktail. The 1919 Sour caught my eye. I’m sure most people won’t have a clue where the name comes from. Aperol was launched in 1919 so I’m sure it’s a reference to that. I tried it and liked it. So, I also made it at home. A nice cocktail for the summer.
Beautiful. A fully flavoured drink. It is short and bitter but a great grown-up cocktail and it looks great too with a distinctive salmon colour.
1919 Sour – the recipe
This one needs shaking with ice in your cocktail shaker. Obviously I don’t know what the proportions were at the restaurant – so I created my own. Try it as follows
- 35 ml Malfy orange gin (aranciata)
- 25 ml Aperol
- 25 ml lemon juice (halve this if you’re using it from a bottle in concentrated form)
- 25 ml sugar syrup
- 50 ml egg white
While you don’t absolutely need egg white, it gives the cocktail a great contrasting coloured foamy head and a silky mouth feel, so it’s well worth the effort.
Another great feature of this cocktail is that it uses 3 of the 5 standby ingredients that any self-respecting mixologist should always have to hand. The full list of the 5 standby cocktail ingredients.
Lo & non-alcohol versions
The gin is the major alcoholic hit in this drink so if you swap it out and add something like Tanqueray Sevilla 0% orange gin, you have 5 ingredients but only one of them is alcoholic. Aperol is 11% ABV so that’s lightly more than 1/4 unit alcohol in your drink.
Alternatively, drop the Aperol too and replace with something like Martini Vibrante for a non-alcoholic version. However, that would change the flavour of the drink, so I recommend the lo-alcohol version rather than the alcohol-free version.
Aperitivo cocktails
Italian style aperitivo cocktails are definitely ‘in’ at the moment. The success of the Aperol Spritz is a great example of this. But the Negroni, Americano or Sbagliato are other alternatives.