The earliest amaretto sours were probably pretty decent cocktails. A measure of the eponymous almond-scented liqueur, plus a little sugar and some fresh lemon juice: The drink started out as a lighter, sweeter alternative to thewhiskey sour, which was ubiquitous in the mid-1970s.
But the amaretto sour soon fell into disrepair; the drink became a pretender of itself. By the late 1980s, published recipes of the amaretto sour were calling for pummeling doses of artificial sour mix instead of fresh juice and sugar. No wonder many drinkers today group it with gimmicky, cloying disco drinks like the Harvey Wallbanger and Blue Hawaii.
But the amaretto sour has transcended its messy adolescence and become so much more than a glassful of heartburn and hangover. The modern craft cocktail movement has cast the drink in one of its signature redemption narratives. Today’samaretto souris deserving of your time and taste buds, arguably more now than ever before.
To get into the story of this cocktail, we should first look at its starring liqueur: amaretto. There are numerous producers of amaretto, mostly located in Italy. The liqueur gets its flavor from the seeds of one or more types of drupes, the category of fruit that includes peaches, cherries, apricots, olives, and almonds. (The seed, or kernel, is enclosed inside the protective shell, or stone, which we often think of as the pit.) Amaretto producers typically use almonds and/or apricot kernels to create oil extracts that then help give the liqueur its most prominent nutty, candied flavors. While amaretto makers don’t tend to disclose their process in detail, it’s common to combine the oil extracts with a neutral spirit, a sweetening agent, such as burnt sugar, and water.
In the finest expressions of amaretto you can taste marzipan, caramel, dark cherry, vanilla, herbs, baking spices, and orange peel. Some amarettos use select varieties of almonds and other drupe seeds to lend a mild bitterness, as well, explaining why the name translates from Italian as “a little bitter.”
If the legends are true, and ones involving boozealwaysare, amaretto made its first appearance about 500 years ago. Bernardino Luini, a renaissance artist who studied under Leonardo da Vinci, was commissioned in 1525 to paint frescoes at a church in Saronno, an Italian town about 20 miles outside Milan. Luini was awed by the local innkeeper who hosted him and asked that she sit as the model for the Virgin Mary in his works.
According to Illva Saronno, the family company that produces Disaronno Originale, the world’s top-selling amaretto, the innkeeper crafted for Luini as a token of her gratitude “a flask full of an amber liqueur, fragrant and delicate”—purportedly history's first instance of amaretto. The way they tell it, a member of Saronno’s Reina family rediscovered that recipe 75 years later. The recipe stayed in the family and, generations later, it’s said to have served as the blueprint for the commercial amaretto liqueur known today as Disaronno Originale. Hence the “1525” on the Disaronno bottle.