South American Vehicles of Drunkenness, Part 1

I write today as a lover of both South America and booze. Among my favorite South American boozes is pisco, a woody brandy made from the Muscat or Quebranta grapes Peru and Chile. I've probably consumed 20 pisco sours in the previous week, so I'll provide my perfected recipe after subjecting you to a shotgun history of this bebida.

Pisco is the enchanted spirit child of the people of Peru, and is actually the product of ancient wine snobbery; the discarded grapes not considered export-worthy for the production of wine were harvested by the field workers and fermented to make pisco. The fever for pisco spread as settlers and other travelers came and went through the growing region, and took pisco with them to drink on their respective joureys. When trade with Spain ceased in the mid-1600s, wine production ceased as well and only a few small pisco producers remained. The Pisco Sour was born abroad and became popular among traveling Americans and Europeans and helped revive the production of pisco.

Although both the Peruvians and the Chileans claim to hold the origin of pisco in their history, its name comes from the Quechua word pisqu, which translates in English as either little bird, or the name of a spiritual clay urn used by the Quechuan people, (there is much dispute over just about everything relating to pisco.) The Quechuan people resided in what is modern-day Ecuador/North Peru; not as far south as Chile although at the time the lands of present-day Chile and Peru were part of the same viceroyalty under the control of Spain. The Pisco growing region is in Peru today, but when it was first produced, neither Peru nor Chile even existed... and so in my book, geography wins and the spirit is referred to as Peruvian today.

Here's my recipe:
2 oz. Pisco
3/4 oz. lemon or key lime
1/4 oz. simple syrup
1 splash of fresh, pulp-free orange juice
1 egg white
Shake until you feel substantial pain in your arm. Strain up. Add a dash of angostura bitters or, if you can get it, Amargo Bitters...

The orange juice is my addition and is merely of cosmetic assistance to the drink; orange juice froths up beautifully when shaken with egg white. I think it's a reasonable modification, though there's no OJ in a traditional Pisco Sour. I put orange juice in every sour I make as I think lemon juice sweetened with sugar alone is still too jarring a combination. Orange juice is somewhere between sweet and tart, and provides a mellower solution to the sourness of lemon.