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Amaretto Reconsidered: From Disco Drink to Classic · Into The Barchive

• Nashville Drinks: Welcome to the Bar-Kai! Where the past comes alive Forgotten drinks will revive ⁓ we thrive! Sip the tails, let them jive Welcome to the Bar-Kai! Welcome in Barkavist to today's episode. Well, April 19th, it's National Amaretto Day, which feels like a good day to talk about one of the most misunderstood bottles on the back bar. You mean this one? That one indeed. Amaretto. It's often written off as overly sweet, outdated, or something that belongs to the era of shag carpet and disco balls. But that reputation tells us more about how it was used than what it actually is. So in today's episode, we're going to try to maybe give a little revival to this bad boy. Yeah. And we're hopefully going to show that Amaretto isn't bad and balanced cocktails are. Before we start diving into the archive, I guess it's time to start getting a couple of cocktails made. Yep. Let's get shaking. Let's do it. For our first cocktail, we have the Amaretto Sour. Not the classic thing that we get from those dive bars, but Jeffrey Morgenthaler's ⁓ enhanced approach to the Amaretto Sour. For this cocktail, we are going to use Di Sorono for both cocktails today. Luxardo is a great brand, or if you've got any of your craft Amaretto's, ⁓ they all do bring their own level of sweetness though, so keep that in mind. But for today, ⁓ Let's go ahead and make this amaretto sour. In your shaking tin, we're going to do an ounce and a half of amaretto. The cool thing about this bad boy is Jeffrey decided to ⁓ make it a little bit more balanced and add a little bit more booze by using a high proof bourbon. We're going to do a three quarter of an ounce. Our next ingredient, one ounce of fresh lemon juice. The next one, a rich simple syrup. Again, sugar levels may vary. So for your cocktail, if you're using a different one, a rich simple syrup might not be the way to go. But a quarter of an ounce. just to add a little bit more sweetness to it. And the great thing about this is an egg white cocktail. So ⁓ for your egg whites, helpful hint, crack outside of the tin that you've got all your liquid in. Go ahead and just give it a nice little crack. and then add your white into the large tin in case you mess this bad boy up, you don't mess up the rest of the cocktail. And that should be good. Keep that to the side. And now we add ice and shake. For this cocktail, we're going to do a reverse dry shake. So wet, wet shake first. for about that 10 to 15 seconds. Speeds may vary based off how vigorously you shake your tins. And now we'll strain. and get rid of that ice. That's bent ice, we'll dump. Re-pour. There's a couple of shard device I heard right there. So, and shake again. Another 10 to 15 seconds. We're trying to build that frothy head. ⁓ yeah. And now, we ice our glass. Instead of using spent ice or loose ice like this, a large clear rock works just as well. Within a few seconds, that head will wilt. It will separate. We'll have a nice froth right across the top. As you can start to see, starting to do that now. And cheers. We have our Amaretto Sour. For our second cocktail, we're going to make a bocce ball. OK. So this one is another one of those 1970s bastardized cocktails using Amaretto, but we're going to improve it. OK. So one of the first steps we're going to do is we're going to make a fluffy orange juice. So I've got some freshly squeezed orange juice here. And this is a technique that's used by Dante on a Peritivo bar in New York City. They make a Garibaldi, which is Campari and orange juice, but they make a fluffy orange juice and they juice the oranges through like one of those high powered juicers. You can also just hand squeeze your orange juice. and use like one of these little aerators you'd use for your milk for your espresso machine. So I'm going to turn it on. Well, maybe. There we go. Kind of put it in there. And so the idea is that it takes this orange juice and gives a little more texture to make the cocktail more interesting. So instead of just using flat orange juice like they would have done in the 70s, it's going to whip this up. Another way you can make fluffy orange juice is do this in a blender if you'd like. But again, I figure why dirty my whole blender to do a couple ounces of this fluffy orange juice when I've got like one of these little frother aerators for the espresso bar. So you can kind of see here how it creates that like foamy head at the top. So I'm going to set that to the side for a moment. This is a building glass cocktail. So I've got my highball glass there. I'm going to grab one of my trusty ice spears, drop that in my highball glass. Then we're going to start with two ounces of our amaretto. So again, using di serrano here, probably the most Popular amaretto brand here in the United States Gonna make sure we pour it off the ice like so one of the other techniques we're going to use to essentially improve this drink and add more complexity is add bitters, so we're gonna hit it with two dashes orange bitters I did four because of the Japanese dasher bottle then I'm gonna hit it with two dashes of Hey, should's better. So again, four dashes here, so. From there, I'm going to add two ounces of club soda. So add that in off the ice. And then finally, add two ounces of my fluffy orange juice to kind of put that on top. Just like so. And this glass is a 10 ounce glass, so it works perfectly in terms of size. We'll add a straw, you see that separate layer there at the bottom with the amaretto. Add my glass and then a little orange half moon garnish and we have an improved bocce ball. Cheers. All right. Now that we've built the cocktails, let's build the context. What is Amaretto? Well, Amaretto is an Italian liqueur with, like if you were to say, what does this taste like? Okay. It tastes nutty. Okay. And like specifically like almonds. Yes. Yeah. It's an almond liqueur. Yeah. So almond Ford flavor profile. But what's interesting is amaretto is typically not made from almonds. No, it's actually made from something else, a pit of another fruit. Yeah, stone fruit. So like apricot pits or peach pits. And they take the apricot kernel oil and macerate it in brandy and then add some herbs and fruits. Now, that's most amaretto producers. One of the other big Italian amaretto producers, Lazzaroni, actually macerates amaretti cookies in a base spirit. And what are those cookies made of? Like, are they still made of different kinds of nuts? Or like the apricot kernel oil things. So I mean, still the same flavor profile, but it's kind of funny that, you know, whereas like a di serrano would start with apricot pits and things like that. Lazzarone does cookies. That is a interesting take on what you can use as a base to then make into your, you know, amaretto liqueur. ⁓ Since we're already on this, common tasting notes of this, ⁓ marzipan? Absolutely. What else do you get? Like cherry pits, so not like just the really sweet flavor, but that flavor of a full cherry like you're eating a fresh cherry, not like a baking cherry. Yep. Vanilla. Absolutely. So, and that's if you're using a brandy base, it's aging in a barrel. So getting some vanilla and maybe some other baking spices again, maybe they're adding some of those herbs and fruits in with the maceration. So that may be coming from the barrel notes of the brandy base. And then the Back to tasting notes, we're talking about more flavor profiles, but tasting notes, again, each one varies in sweetness based off which brand you get. They use different bricks of, you know, so it's going to have a different sugar content. Absolutely. Go ahead. So take me back. Amaretto starts where? So Amaretto dates back to the Renaissance. Okay. And it comes originally from the town of Serono. Okay. Which is in the Lombardy province of Italy. So D Serrano means from Serrano from Serrano. So that's the brand. This is where Amaretto originates. Serrano D Serrano. ⁓ I actually did not ever think of that. It makes perfect sense now that they also then kind of pigeonholed that it's theirs. Everybody else just calls theirs Amaretto. Right. And look here. So these are jumped on it and owns that naming right. Yeah, and De Cereno is kind of one of those brands that we kind of ⁓ associate with the whole category. Like De Cereno, instead of thinking, ⁓ like, ⁓ Lazzaroni is another form of De Cereno, or like how we use the word Kleenex. Yeah, instead of a tissue, facial tissue. So De Cereno pretty much has that status when it comes to amarettoes. The use of stone fruit pits. How does this play into making this this liqueur? So the use of the pits reflects old European practices of let's extract maximum flavor from our agricultural byproducts. So, you know, this is about like, how can we we can take the fruit, eat the fruit, but then we're left over with these pits. What can we do with them? Make them into liquor. Right? And so it's an economy of flavor. So long before sustainability becomes a buzzword, they're thinking, ⁓ how can we use this? It's like using an animal, right? So not just for the meat, but for the hides using all the parts to extract maximum value. mean, the Italians have a long tradition of this thing. Grappa. Yes. Making sure that after they've pressed, they have now used that pressed and distilled it just to get little extra out of it Exactly and so you know for much of Italy's history particularly in the southern parts of Italy They're quite poor. So they're trying to extract maximum value Use and when we say maximum value we're talking about making sure that we use every part of whatever ingredient which would be a fruit From the flesh to eat all the way to the seed that's inside of it making sure that we get the max use of that one thing just because of poverty. Yeah. And like with the grappa, it's like, okay, we're going to grow the grapes, ferment the grapes, turn them into wine. We're going to press what's left. The stems, the everything, ferment it, distill it and make grappa. Yep. So same principle. ⁓ Amaretto came around. This liqueur, much like probably most liqueurs is Not just for a spirit. It was made for digestif. Yeah, I mean this De Sorenno and other amaretti or were not designed to be used in cocktails. They were designed to be sipped on their own like after a meal to help stimulate digestion or like as a little dessert. Of course, one of the greatest contributions of the United States is the cocktail. Yeah, but much of these European ingredients that we have used in our cocktails were meant originally to be consumed by themselves. Yeah, they can stand alone. An almond liqueur, again, that flavor of mascarpone, right? A very dessert-esque thing. Or if you wanted to go minty, going like a fornette or something, again, they can stand on their own. They're just great spices to bring to the table when making a cocktail. Absolutely. The history of the amaretto and amaretto cocktails then. Bring me into that. So kind of going from the renaissance of where does amaretto come from to where do we get amaretto in cocktails is when we move to what many people consider the dark ages of the cocktail, the 1970s, the 1980s, amaretto was very sweet. And like when you put your nose up to these drinks, I mean, it is super aromatic. Yeah, it punches you in the face and you think that's all I'm gonna get. Luckily for these cocktails, it's more of a shock. It's like, you get a facade before you actually get the real flavors that are gonna come to the party. Yeah, but like it's ⁓ stimulating all the senses in a way. And amaretto mixes easily with juice. It mixes easily with soda ⁓ and many historians believe that the amaretto sour ⁓ developed in 1974 at the behest of the rep of De Serena their importer who's like, okay, I'm bringing the spirit into the United States. How am I gonna move this? I mean not only does that story hold true back then? It holds true today because even on the back of the bottle, it has the basis of how to make the cocktails. So the two parts di serrano, or two parts di serrano, one part lemon juice or sour, right, or something? Yeah, it says, like, ⁓ for this to do, like, nine parts di serrano, one part lemon juice. ⁓ So I mean, the amaretto sour, Essentially starts as one of those recipes like you'd find on the back of the bottle of liquor Right. And so, know, this is a way because in America we don't necessarily have that same culture of digest steve's and things like that is How can we sell this product here in the United States? Well, we need to turn into a cocktail and to move more cases instead of it being part of like a eight ingredient cocktail How can we make it part of two, maybe three, so that the consumer goes to the liquor store, you know, they have the rep there at the tasting table and you're like, gosh, that tastes really good. What can I do with this at my house? And then that's where the bastardization comes in and the sour mix. Yeah. So originally the amaretto sour was just like a couple parts, two serrano, couple apart lemon juice. That's it. But then convenience factor, right? It's the Sal Sweet and sour mix, is citric acid, high fric toast corn syrup, artificial everything. So it's based off one thing, sweetness, sweetness, sweetness, sweetness, sweetness, back in our earlier drinking days, that's how most of us were introduced to alcohol was the sweeter the drink, the more that we would. Drink it like bitter was not something that you enjoyed at a younger age So having a sweet amaretto sour when you went to the dive bar where they were using that And then the sour mix from the gun, right? It made sense But that's just a piss-poor drink Absolutely. Well, thanks to Jeffrey Morgenthaler ⁓ One of our favorite bartenders. He rescued that drink from oblivion and so let's If you don't mind, let's dive down into his version of the Amaretto Sour then. So his interpretation was Amaretto is a great ingredient. The Amaretto Sour is not a bad cocktail. It needed just to be refined. It was missing something. It was missing the sour. It was missing some booze too. Yeah. And so like because you were talking about sweet on sweet on sweet. So the amaretto sour wasn't sour, but when you start playing, when he was playing with those proportions, right? It's like, okay. Even going back to fresh lemon juice, adding, ⁓ a little simple syrup, like it still was too sweet. It wasn't balanced. So this is where the high proof bourbon comes into play. It actually, swings that sweetness and it tames it like yes, it does we joke that it has more booze to the cocktail, but it's truly there to tame the sweetness down you need that overproof to Tamper. Yeah, so I mean like if you did like an amaretto sour if we applied our sour template to it of two ounces amaretto three quarters ounce lemon juice three quarters ounce simple syrup and then add an egg white I mean, that's a sour, right? Yeah. Still too sweet. So that ⁓ high proof or cash strength bourbon is going to help balance the cocktail out and give it body. Now, I will say, you know, Jeffrey Morgenthaler was working on this cocktail earlier in the 2000s. And so his initial revision of this for his cash strength bourbon use Bookers. Really? Absolutely. That would have been a great cocktail to try at the time. Absolutely. But ⁓ if you're a bourbon aficionado, you know that Booker's bourbon is essentially a hundred dollars a bottle. A little bit more expensive than that old Grandad 114 that we used. Yeah. And so like for us, when we think about how can you Do an amaretto sour without using that expensive hundred dollar bottle of cash strength bourbon old granddad 114 is a Good choice great value. Yeah, I mean you're talking Depending on your market here in Tennessee were thirty dollars a bottle for 750 milliliters So, you know less than a third of the cost of buying a bottle of Booker's I mean, that's a great value And because of the old granddad flavor profile, it's got more rye in it. Yep. And you know, think about what notes does a higher rye content and a bourbon mash spill? What does that give us? Well, for me, I enjoy that pepper that it brings to the table. So for this cocktail, it adds that kind of another spice to the amaretto sour. It gives me as peppery flavor. Yeah, and I mean, whether it's peppery baking spices, it's going to help dry out the cocktail a little. Yep. Right. And it's going to proof it up because this DeSarono, for instance, is 28 % ABV. But then you add that with a 114 proof bourbon. And that's putting us back into more traditional sour territory, where if it was just amaretto, lemon juice, simple syrup, egg white. That's a pretty low ABV sour. This is not a base spirit. jumping from the amaretto sour over to the bocce ball, which is a great name for a cocktail. Bocce ball being a sport, know, the sport of bocce from this region. So therefore it just makes complete sense. The Italian, ⁓ the Italian play on the name of a cocktail. Tell me about the bocce ball. So the bocce ball was traditionally just amaretto club soda orange juice. That's it. Okay. ⁓ the soda water is used as a filler there and we know one of the issues with orange juice in a cocktail. There's no acidity, ⁓ no real bitterness or structure. Orange juice can kind of be flabby, a little sweet. Yeah. You mentioned that while making the cocktail. We Our approach to orange juice in cocktails, does, it's flabby, flat is the word that comes to mind. ⁓ Acid adjusting or citrus adjusting ⁓ orange juice is something that we do just to enhance certain cocktails. In the past, the Garibaldi, like we've ⁓ used acid adjusted orange juice just to make that thing pop just a little bit more. Yeah, and so those are some big Problems to deal with so this is an updated version from the brow bronze owl bar in New York City So as I was demonstrating some of the things so we saw the amaretto We saw the club soda one of the adjustments we made is on the size of the glass right is When you look at glass size if you use a pint glass That's gonna be a lot of soda water a lot of orange juice and it's gonna water the cocktail down. So what we're doing said, use appropriate glassware. Then we can ⁓ do the fluffy orange juice technique to make that orange juice more interesting. And then adding the bitters. Yeah, so we have now added more complexity to something that's very basic. And sometimes adding... more nuance to the cocktail is the thing that elevates it enough to take it from blah to ⁓ Yeah. And so like with the orange bitters, you're doubling down on the orange flavor profile, but you're adding that extra bitterness profile that the orange juice itself is lacking. True. And then the Peychaud's bitters adds chariot, adds anise and things like that to elevate the drink. I this is going to go a little bit away from the the amaretto but Those retro cocktails which the amaretto sour is one of those retro cocktails the bocce ball Like fixing them. How do you what's what's the mindset of fixing a retro cocktail? Yeah, so from the 70s and 80s these disco era cocktails Again, of which, Amaretto, sour, and bocce ball, they're both from this era. Some of the big problems, too sweet. Okay. So how do we solve for too much sugar? Or in the case of the bocce ball, no acid. None at all. Yeah, you're using orange juice that doesn't have acidity or in a sour mix, maybe that acidity is muted by all the high fructose corn syrup. And then there's no bitterness or structure in the drink. So those are pretty common issues from all the cocktails of the 70s and 80s that were invented in that period. Okay, fixing this means addressing those three things, but how do you go about fixing it? Does it require fancy gear? Does it require specialty ingredients? Not really. I mean, despite me using like a little aerator frother to fluff my orange. could have just as easily put it into a shaking tin and fluffed it up by shaking it just like we did to whipping an egg white. Exactly. So, I mean, that's not big. I would say the number one thing you can do fresh citrus, not sour mix. ⁓ definitely. If we're going, so ⁓ we, we now make our own sour mix when we make ⁓ a version of a, ⁓ ⁓ An AMF you're right a Long Island where it calls for a sour mix to be in that drink ⁓ of equal parts of ⁓ Lemon and lime and then whatever that is simple syrup Exactly. So if you use the most important thing you can do is use fresh juice and then like house-made Syrups. Yes, and I mean it doesn't have to be complex. It's called simple syrup for a reason typically It's the liquid and sugar. Yeah, and if it's more sweet Then it's usually the liquid and more sugar. Yeah. So that's the first thing. The second thing you can do is adjust the ratios. So like playing with the ratio of the juice, like in yours, like instead of a classic sour template of two ounce spirit, three quarter, three quarters. So three quarters citrus, three quarters sweetener because this amaretto has sugar in it, you don't need as much sugar. So dialing that back to the quarter, right? And even for this one, Di Cirono, would say is probably one of the more sweeter of the Amaretto's like, like the Losardo brand we would potentially use from time to time is not as sweet. So using the rich simple syrup, I typically dial that back to just a simple syrup. Right? Yeah. Have the last item then that you would say that helps fixes this. I think this is what Jeffrey Morgan Fowler does well in the Amaretto Sour is he adds a base spirit or bitter element. So adding that cash strength bourbon to balance out the Amaretto or in the case of my improved bocce ball from the bronze owl is adding the bitters. So it's adding structure to cut. that are otherwise too sweet and flabby. The keynote to this is we are not disregarding and just pushing aside the original cocktail. We're actually like trying to embrace and respect what it's supposed to be. We're just doing a little bit more by upgrading the execution to this. Absolutely. I mean, if you think about you talked about like ordering a Amaretto sour, like when, you know, after your turn 21, things like that. There's a certain nostalgia like you like some of those dive bar drinks But now where you are with your palate journey That's that drink as it was made in the dive bar doesn't hit anymore It's like, you know those childhood treats and ingredients you're like I haven't had one of those in 20 years you go back and you're like this isn't as near nearly as good as I remember it being so It taps into that nostalgia, right? ⁓ And I think it excites us emotionally and like our emotion and our sense of smell or sense of taste are intricately connected. And so I think it taps into that, but does it in a more refined adult way. For the, for the Marinasara, remember us putting this in a cocktail class and people were like, really? Really? We're going to do that thing. And we're like, give it a chance, give it a chance. And once they dove into it, right, they, was because it has been elevated. It's not the shell of the cocktail that it was of the past, the way that it's presented here. Now I'm saying if you go to a bar around your normal neighborhood, how they're going to make that, I can't speak to how they're going to make it, but the way that it's presented here is a fantastic drink. Yeah. Bring us home for Amaretto. So as we've seen with Amaretto, ⁓ cocktail history has a funny way of repeating itself. Ingredients fall in and out of favor not because they're inherently good or bad. Di Sereno hasn't changed that much, right? It's because how they're used or misused. Misused. And by the culture around them. in the 1970s, amaretto becomes shorthand for sweetness and convenience and somewhere along the way balance gets lost in all of that. But when we return to fresh citrus, better ratios and a little intention, those old disco era drinks don't just improve. They remind us why people loved them in the first place. And we hope you love your next Amaretto cocktail. ⁓ As we close today, we remind you, please like, subscribe, comment to this episode in the bottom. We'll get back to you. ⁓ All the feedback that we get helps us improve this. Let us know how your Amaretto drink tastes or the specs that you like the most. Feel free to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. Apple, Spotify. And then, ⁓ What we'll do is if you want to, can also email us at podcast at into the bar, ⁓ into the archive.com and we'll get back to you there. What do we got for the next episode? So that idea of like revisiting that rather than rejecting the past is where we're headed next. We're continuing that in a way. So in our next episode, we'll fast forward a couple of decades to the 1990s. Okay. And so this is when the cocktail world found itself in a different place. It was the era of the martini bar, but not the martini you're thinking of. This is the era where anything served in a V-shaped glass is a martini, whether it had gin, vodka, or neither of those ingredients. So we'll take a fresh look at two icons of that period. The Appletini and the porn star. Yep, and we're going to ask the same question we asked today. What happens when we strip away excess and rebuild these strengths with better ingredients and better balance? Thank you for digging into the past with us into the Bar Archive. Cheers!