Amaretto Sour

You can, and it will taste like marzipan in a glass. The whiskey isn't there for strength so much as for tannin and oak, which give the almond something to push against. Cask-strength bourbon at 15 ml does more work than a standard bottling at 30.

They vary enormously in sweetness, and that's the thing to check. Disaronno is the sweet benchmark. Lazzaroni runs drier and more bitter-almond in character, with Luxardo somewhere between the two. Taste yours neat first, then decide whether the drink needs added syrup at all.

Probably the syrup. Amaretto is one of the sweeter liqueurs on the shelf, so the small measure here is a top-up rather than a base. Leave it out, taste, then add it back a barspoon at a time. Bottled sour mix is the other usual culprit.

Both, though mostly texture. Egg white has almost no flavor of its own. What it does is coat your tongue and slow everything down, so the almond arrives gradually instead of all at once, and the lemon's edge softens. Dry shake first or you get bubbles, not foam.

Over ice. This one improves as it dilutes, and the sweetness gets easier the further down the glass you go. Straight up in a coupe it arrives at full intensity and stays there. If you serve it up anyway, drop the syrup and add 5 ml more lemon.

A classic Amaretto Sour calls for 45 ml (1.5 oz) Amaretto, 15 ml (0.5 oz) Bourbon, 22 ml (0.75 oz) Fresh lemon juice, 8 ml (0.25 oz) Simple syrup, 1 egg white Egg white. That single-serve spec scales cleanly — the recipe above converts it to oz and multiplies it for 2–4 drinks.

A standard Amaretto Sour is roughly 19% ABV once mixed (before ice melt softens it further). That makes it about as strong as a glass of wine.