17. Highballs: The Core – any spirit that also provides its own seasoning 

Online School of Cocktailory  🍸

For drinking #alonetogether 

Section 105: The Highball

At its most basic level, any two-ingredient rail drink qualifies as a highball, but the ingredients, the preparation, and the presentation are what make these cocktails shine. For the purpose of our liquor studies in each section, we’ll discuss Scotch, Irish, and Japanese whisky in a Whisky Highball this week. 

Single-malt scotch must only contain barley and water, must be distilled at least twice in copper pot stills, and then aged in oak casks for a minimum of 3 years, produced by only one distillery.  Each batch can be blended with other different aged batches, but the year stamp on the bottle, like 12-year, states the youngest whisky that’s in the mix. Most of Scotland’s whisky is is made in the Highlands like Glenlivet and Macallan. Lowlands whisky is usually light-bodied, a little sweeter, and has some peat smoke smell. Scottish Isles whisky is considered full-bodied, aggressive,  and intensely smokey, so very little is needed in mixed drinks to get the flavor across. Actually since most single-malts are pretty expensive, using just a little in a cocktail to accompany another cheaper whiskey is a cost effective method to play with balance and seasoning without accidentally ordering yourself a $50 cocktail. 

Blended scotch is a little cheaper, and gets more flexibility in that the producers can source single-malts from different distilleries, and the barrel aging is more like 6 months. 

There are Irish whiskies that follow the same requirements as a single-malt, but more often you’ll see the art of blending lots of whiskies with different grain comps & barrel types, in larger pot stills, and going through a triple distillation process. They’re usually light in flavor like a young-aged bourbon and good blended into citrusy cocktails. A pure pot still Irish whiskey however, like the Redbreast 12-year has a heavier coconut oil quality that can stand alone in an old-fashioned style drink. 

Japanese Whisky has very few regulations on stills, casks, or processes, so distilleries produce a pretty wide range of styles. That being said they’re also a limited export and there are only a few brands that make it here that aren’t crazy expensive. 

Homework time! Since we’ve already spent a chapter studying whiskies, this time we’re going to study how the seltzer in a highball affects different spirits. The base recipe to any highball is 2 oz. spirit + 4 oz. seltzer water on ice. This recipe is then pushed one way or the other depending on how flavorful the spirits or mixers are to achieve a good balance. 

To start, pick a few liquors you’d like to try, and a couple bottles of plain seltzer. These tests you can do on different nights, so repeat with any liquor or fortified wine combo another day as you wish. Whiskey, gin, brandy, dark or spiced rum, or any other big-flavored alcohol will work well. I’ll start with a gin. 

Pour 2 oz. gin into a highball glass, add 3 ice cubes, and stir for 5 seconds. Take a sip, and see what you can taste. What can you smell? Now add 4 oz. cold seltzer, stir once, and take a sip. How is it different now? Do you smell the gin more or less? Are there different flavors you notice now that the alcohol is spread out? Do you think you would have noticed them if it was plain water instead? 

Try it again with another spirit and see what happens. Do different flavors come out? The only alcohol I wouldn’t recommend in this trial is tequila, as the seltzer will become almost painfully spicey when it hits your nose. 

Alright thanks for joining me on another week in isolation of Captain Nemo’s deep sea dive into the world of cocktails. Cheers my fellow explorers  🥃🥃

“Of all the world’s spirits, none brings out the nerds like scotch does, and for good reason…” pg. 203 of the Cocktail Codex