Pisco Sour

A Pisco Sour is a cocktail typical of western South American cuisine. The drink's name is a combination of the word Pisco, its base liquor, and the term sour and the term sour (in reference to a lime juice and sweetener components). The Peruvian Pisco Sour requires the use of Peruvian Pisco as the base liquor and the addition of lime (or lemon) juice, syrup, ice, egg white, and Angostura bitters. The Chilean version is similar, but uses Chilean Pisco, sugar instead of syrup, and excludes the bitters. Other variants of the cocktail include those created with fruits like pineapple or plants such as coca leaves.

The cocktail originated in Lima, Peru, invented by Victor Vaughn Morris, an American bartender, in the early 1920s. Morris left his native United States in 1903 to work in Cerro de Pasco, a city in central Peru. In 1916, he opened Morris' Bar in Lima, and his saloon quickly became a popular spot for the Peruvian upper class and English-speaking foreigners. The oldest known mentions of the Pisco Sour are from a 1921 magazine attributing Morris as the inventor and a 1924 advertisement from Morris' Bar published in a newspaper from the port of Valparaiso, Chile.

The Pisco Sour underwent several changes until Mario Bruiget, a Peruvian bartender working at Morris' Bar, created the modern Peruvian recipe of the cocktail in the latter part of the 1920s by adding Angostura bitters and egg whites to the mix. In Chile, historian Oreste Plath attributed the invention of the drink to Elliot Stubb, an English steward of a ship named Sunshine, who allegedly mixed key lime juice, syrup, and ice cubes to create the cocktail in a bar in the port city of Iquique in 1872. However, the original source cited by Plath attributed the invention of Whiskey Sour to Stubb, not Pisco Sour.

Chile and Peru both claim the Pisco Sour as their national drink, and each asserts exclusive ownership of both Pisco and the cocktail. Moreover, Peru celebrates a yearly public holiday in honor of the cocktail during the first Saturday of February. Nonetheless, beverage experts concur that both kinds of Pisco are completely distinct in both production and taste. Partially as a result of this controversy, the Pisco Sour holds notability as a topic of Latin American popular culture.