Cocktail Hour - Dark Rum Sour

To Cuba via South America this week, all in the name of booze.

Those of you who've read the previous cocktail columns will know that I have something of an obsession with sours. I've tried various ones over the years, but never with rum.

Purely to help the digestion you understand...

To that end I spent a while researching recipes and came up with a rum based take on a Pisco Sour. (Pisco is a South American grape brandy produced in Peru and Chile - something to add to the tasting list if I can find it.)

I used a 7 year old Havana Club, simply because that's what I currently have in the drinks cabinet, but I suspect this cocktail would work really well with a darker navy rum or Goslings just to really give the sweet and sour contrast a kick.

Egg white, deliberately missed by some bartenders in sours, adds a smoother texture to the finished cocktail so I urge you not to skip it.

The Angostura Bitters gives things a nice lift, its medicinal botanicals technically making this sour an aperitif - a perfect pre dinner snifter.

It's just a pity we don't get to enjoy any of that Cuban sunshine in Denmark...

Ingredients & Equipment:

• 60ml dark rum
• 30ml lime juice
• 20ml simple syrup
• 1 egg white
• 2 dashes, Angostura Bitters
• Ice
• Cocktail shaker
• Rocks glass, cooled (or old fashioned glass, if you have one)

Procedure

• Dry shake the egg white with the rum, lime juice and simple syrup (shaking egg white without ice properly emulsifies the ingredients before adding ice and re-shaking). 
• Shake vigorously. Add ice and re-shake
• Shake a couple of dashes of bitters in to the cooled rocks glass, over ice if you like
• Pour contents of shaker in to the glass
• Garnish with a little mint

Bottoms up! (This cocktail is quite bracing, so I suggest sitting before consuming. Definitely don't attempt to fashion a coherent blog post.)