Apricot Brandy Sour – Recipe from David Embury’s ‘The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks’

Any spirituous liquor (but not a liqueur) can, of course, be substituted for the gin, rum, whisky, etc., in the above recipes and, with such substitution of the appropriate liquor, you can have a VODKA SOUR, a TEQUILA SOUR, an AQUAVIT SOUR, an APRICOT BRANDY SOUR, a KIRSCH SOUR, and so on—as long as your varieties of spirituous liquors hold out. I suppose you could even have a SLIVOVITZ SOUR, though why, I wouldn’t know. On second thought, perhaps a bit of lime juice and sugar might tame that otherwise fractious and unbridled liquor down to a point where it could be swallowed without inducing convulsions.

Embury really doesn’t like Slivovitz, I like to think there’s a wonderful story involving him, copious Slivovitz, a bar somewhere in eastern Europe and several hours of missing memory followed by the worst hangover of his life, and its just a shame that he grew up in a time void of social media so that these images or the story isn’t captured for posterity somewhere.

For the Apricot Brandy Sour I experimented a little, my recipe was as follows

Apricot Brandy Sour

4 parts Cognac

4 parts Apricot Brandy (Cartron)

2 parts Lime Juice

Shake and strain into a short cocktail glass

The apricot brandy I use from Cartron is really closer to a liqueur, and needs tempering down a little to make the drink work. I was going to use his 8-2-1 recipe but left out the sugar because of Cartron’s sweetness, and it worked pretty well. I’ve said before I think Apricot is underused, and I really like it in a sour like this. If we were to put something like this on the list I’d add some bitters of some kind, and probably some aquafaba.