Pisco Capel / Pisco Sour

Aloha TC 'ohana

The editor of a local Chicago rockabilly 'zine asked me to write something about Pisco for her, so I did.

Given the recent resurgence in debate on TC over ideal mai tai and zombie recipes, I thought I'd not only share my Pisco article with interested parties, but perhaps expand the debate to include Pisco recipes.

Granted, Pisco is not a traditional Tiki drink, being South American in origin, but given that it is the drink of choice among the residents of Easter Island, I think it should be granted a position in any good Tiki Bar.

JT

A man on a quest:
Traveling the globe pursuing the perfect Pisco.

by James Teitelbaum

After sampling the latest version of my constantly evolving Pisco Sour recipe at Anne and Stephan Gelau's great barbecue on July 12, Re-Vue editor Susan Funk asked about the genesis of that particular potation. After my slurred oration on the legend of Pisco, she suggested that I write about it for Re-Vue. This story doesn�t have Jack Daniels to do with the Chicago RAB community, but hey, I do what the lady who runs the magazine tells me to do, you know?

So, we proudly present to you the tale of the Pisco Sour.

It started, of all places, on the single most remote inhabited spot on the planet, the mystical island of Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island), in May of 2000.

No, actually it started at Sam's Wine in Chicago in 1997.

While wondow shipping at the liquor store, I spied a big black bottle that looked like a Moai (or a Rapa Nui ancestor carving) full of some mysterious liqueur called Pisco Capel. I didn't care what the stuff was, I just wanted the ultra cool bottle for display in my Tiki room at home. Of course, it would be folly to let that 80 proof booze go to waste, so I started trying to drink it. I say 'trying' because the spirits in that bottle were angry ones. The stuff in that bottle was vile. Pisco originated in Peru, but it is now as ubiquitous in Chile as Old Style signs are in Bucktown. It is essentially a brandy made of white muscat grapes. Attempts were made to drink it as a shot, and then with soda, and then with juice... no luck.

Now we can forward to Easter Island in May of 2000. There are only 1900 people on the island, and they all live in a little village called Hanga Roa, which is on one corner of the roughly triangular island, 3500 miles west of the coast of Chile. Since Chile governs Rapa Nui, the islanders are at the mercy of the mainland. They get a supply ship a couple of times per year. If you find yourself in one of Hanga Roa's two bars (each of which seats about 12 people) you drink whatever it is that happened to come over on the last boat. In most cases it is Pisco, since this particular rocket fuel is made in Chile. So, the islanders have become pretty adept at finding ways to make it drinkable.

The most common recipe is what they call a Pisco Sour. Both of Hanga Roa's little pubs make it differently; I took notes about both variations after coming back from long days of hiking through the ruins of a lost civilization, looking at the monumental Moai figures, and getting bit by a black widow spider (really!).

My next stop that spring was in Santiago, Chile. Most of the bars there make Pisco Sours, as well as a bunch of other recipes using this ubiquitous local aqua vitae. Other companies besides Capel make Pisco. Inca Pisco comes in a bottle that looks - you guessed it - like an Incan Sun God, in direct competition with Capel's superior souvenir Moai decanter. Inca Pisco tastes no better than Pisco Capel, by the way. The Chileans like to mix their Pisco with unlikely ingredients such as raw egg. I was willing to give this firewater another shot, but there's no way I was putting eggs into my hootch. I don't like to mix both of my favorite breakfasts in one glass, see? But here's the rub (finally): blended with the proper ingredients (not eggs), this Pisco stuff is actually really good. You just need to find the right things to compliment it.

Pisco is $23 a bottle at Sam's, but only $8 at the duty free shops (those prices are for the Moai bottle; it also comes in a clear glass vessel for less dough). Now that the Chileans and Easter Islanders had enlightened me in the way to make this rotgut taste good, I could justify stocking up on a bunch of the slick bottles - and drink the contents enjoyably.

Back home, I experimented with amalgamations of all of the various Pisocombinations collected on Rapa Nui and in Chile, and I added some touches of my own. Two years later, when it came time to add a dozen classic Tropical Drink recipes to my book, Tiki Road Trip (Santa Monica Press, 2003), I decided in a moment of whimsy and perhaps ego to add my customized libationary souvenir of the South Pacific to the listing of classic and no-longer secret 1940s and 1950s blends by such legends as Trader Vic, Don the Beachcomber, and Paul Fong.

Since then, the recipe has been refined even further, with the reinstatment of some ingredients left out of the previous revision, and he deletion of the orange juice (and thanks to Nels from http://www.tikizone.com, the only other guy I know who's actually been to Rapa Nui, for a reminder about the brown sugar!). Believe it or not, adding too much fruit juice to Tropical Drinks is cheating: the best ones achieve a refreshing taste without resorting to dumping a lot of pineapple juice into the mix.

So, here (in print for the first time), is the latest version of a constantly evolving drink, the recipe for which has been tracked and tweaked from Chicago to Easter Island to Chile to Berwyn and back.

Aku Hall Sour (Pisco Sour) v.4.0

For two:
5 ounces Pisco Capel
1.5 oz fresh lemon juice
1.5 oz fresh lime juice
1 ounce Orange Curacao
1 ounce rock candy syrup (may substitute simple bar syrup)
1 ounce Falernum
1 dash orange bitters.

Mix ingredients and two large handfuls of ice in blender until ice is completely crushed.
Pour into Moai-shaped Tiki Mugs with 1/2 lime rind in each.
Float a little Myers rum on top.
Sprinkle a half spoonful of brown sugar over the top.
Add paper umbrella skewering pineapple chunk.
Drink.
Say: 'Hey - this is good!'
Repeat until soused.

[ Edited by: tikibars 2006-12-01 00:37 ]

Thanks for the new receipe. Your previous version from the drink contest thread was the best Pisco Sour I've had to date, so I can't wait to get home and try this new version - especially since I still have two and a quarter bottles of Pisco Capel left to drink.

Spat's in Berkeley was where I tasted my first Pisco Sour - very tasty! They have an interesting drink menu, and the descriptions on the menu itself (not posted) are a hoot an a holler:

http://www.spats.citysearch.com/4.html

They seem to have a mai tai there but I"ve never tried it. Any "Spat's Virgins" must be subjected to the Fogcutter, naturally (sorry for the Rocky Horror reference)

Ah, fond memories of undergrad drinking in soft, rotting antique chairs...

James-

Have you tried making the recipe with fresh lemon instead of sour mix? I'd be curious to try that. But it may need a little more sugar. Sour mix is nasty stuff IMO.

Hey, this is good!

I asked my wife to sample my drink. She asked me what it was. When I said a Pisco Sour she started backing away. When I finally convinced her that it wasn't terrible she reluctantly tried it. Then she said, hey, this is good!

man, what a great font of information you are. i distracted myself from my homesickness here by scouring "tiki road trip" one sunday afternoon, and now this.
now i just have to find some pisco. i'm dying to try this - although it would make it even better to look at one of those cool moai bottles while drinking it.

On 2003-07-22 20:10, Suburban Hipster wrote:
...she reluctantly tried it. Then she said, hey, this is good!

But did she repeat until soused, as per the directions? :)

Dean: Next month, bring a bottle of lemon juice to my pad and we'll find out!

Rain: do search on-line, there are places where you can order it.

On 2003-07-23 12:19, tikibars wrote:

But did she repeat until soused, as per the directions? :)

No, but then she's not a good at following directions as I am. I complied though. I have less than two bottle of Pisco left now. I'm gonna have to order more soon. :)

You want to talk pisco sours? Have been making them for years. Have an old friend from Peru and this is his recipe-

Fill blender with ice, add 9oz.pisco,4oz.of fresh squeezed lemon juice,7-8 teaspoons reg. sugar or 7 equals if need to watch sugar. Add one egg white.Blend well. Pour into 10-12oz glass with stem. Put a few drops of bitters on top!Then let the party begin!

I suddenly feel my life may be in danger for having read this highly sensitive information. I must drink heavily to obliterate the brain cells in which this knowledge is stored. Read at your own risk:

New U.S. 'Secrets' Include Pinochet's Pisco Sours

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Don't tell anyone, but Augusto Pinochet was partial to scotch and pisco sours.

This information about the former Chilean dictator's beverage preferences used to be public knowledge but is now one of 14 million U.S. secrets that were classified last year, the National Security Archive -- an independent nongovernmental watchdog group -- said on Monday.

That's up from 11 million national security secrets classified in 2002 and 8 million the year before that, the archive said in a statement, which also included the details on what Pinochet liked to drink.

That piquant information was included in a 1975 biographical sketch of Pinochet by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The sketch was released in full in 1999 when President Bill Clinton declassified U.S. documents related to human rights abuses in Chile. It was re-released in 2003, but with much of the material blacked out. Now it is officially under wraps again, but the archive posted both the blacked-out and full versions on its Web site, http://www.nsarchive.org.

"It's reflexive, knee-jerk secrecy," said the archive's director, Thomas Blanton. "Nobody's back there behind the curtain asking, 'Does this secret make us safer or is it just to keep somebody from being embarrassed?"'

The information on the 14 million new secrets comes from a new report released to President Bush by the Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees the national security secrecy system, the archive said.

The National Security Archive is an independent nongovernmental research institute and library.

I had it all backwards -- the best bed is the one that's stumbling distance from Tiki-Ti, or the Mai Kai, or the Lagoon Room, or the Alibi, or the Kon Tiki, or...
Critiki

[ Edited by: Humuhumu on 2004-05-03 17:01 ]

Pisco & Scotch? That sounds just vile! (And believe you me, I've concocted & drank some vile abominations when I was a starving college student!)

Pisco and Scotch?

That falls more under a different thread from last summer: the one dealing with when I concoted "James Mistake" at Tikivixen's pad. It was. Maybe we should have a 'new drink disasters' thread.

I've been monkeying around with Jab's idea to use lemon juice instead of sour mix. Haven't found the right ratio yet.

When I do make it with sour mix, I am only using 3.5 oz or even only 3 oz these days instead of 4 oz.

FWIW.

Pisco is serious business to the Peruvians...
http://gurukul.ucc.american.edu/TED/PISCO.HTM
Aloha,
:tiki:

They've just started stocking Pisco Capel at one of the larger liquor stores here in Carrumbia. I'm afraid to try it after reading all of this.

My first and only tango with pisco sours started when of all things my wife had jury duty. Where of all things she met a friend neither were chosen for the jury. And about a week later my wife made plans for us to go out on like a wednesday. Which I was a bit leery of the whole situation and didn't want to go.

My wife kept saying she was bodacious. Well let's just say she was a smoking, volutptous south american beauty. And her supposed boyfriend was going to start importing the drink into our town. So all the free pisco sours one could drink, beautiful women, and a club. Needless to say it would have been perfect, although my wife realizes she's not having fun, i'm having too much fun. My thinking was something like you dragged me out, now I'm going to have fun regardless. Well she didn't like that and proceeds to call it a nite for us. As we're leaving her new friend says we should get together for a cookout this weekend and we can hang out at her pool. Which sounded great to me, thinking how can anything turn out this great from jury duty. Well I never did see the pool or her friend or a pisco sour---again.

Its funny I have seen this bottle in a local liqour store the owner tells me there is a group of guys from TO who buy it so he keeps it stocked....a little intimitated by a liqour I couldn't identify I have been arguing with myself when to pick it up...the bottle rocks....now I have a recipe to work from......thanx

Hey Doc, I've heard so many negative reviews of Pisco drinks that I decided to keep my super-cool Moai bottle sealed... After the hell I went through to find it I'm too nervous to crack it open.

since its at the corner (not my corner) Liqour Store who claims he will order anything I ask for if its available and legal in cali I figure have to try it......besides a full bottle kinda seems sacrelious

On 2005-03-31 11:55, johntiki wrote:
Hey Doc, I've heard so many negative reviews of Pisco drinks that I decided to keep my super-cool Moai bottle sealed... After the hell I went through to find it I'm too nervous to crack it open.

They have it at internetwines.com.

http://store.yahoo.com/randalls/rws17134.html

I bought a couple of bottles from them. I don't think it's that bad. I made up a drink using Pisco Capel that I think was pretty good. I'd post it but I recently started taking Claritin and have regained some of my sense of smell. Everything tastes different now! I'll try the drink tomorrow and if it's not horrible I'll post it. :)

Here's how I got my moai pisco bottle:

http://www.tikicentral.com/viewtopic.php?topic=2989&forum=1

Still haven't tried pisco itself, though....

Trader Woody

OK, I tried my Pisco drink tonight, all jacked up on Claritin, and I thought is was pretty good. Actual user experience may vary.

Ingredients:

Recipe:

Jaguar God

1.5oz Pisco Capel
.75oz AGWA liqueur
.5oz passionfruit syrup
.5oz freshly squeezed lime juice

Shake and pour over crushed ice in a small rocks glass.

It's a small drink because the ingredients are hard to come by (Pisco Capel and especially AGWA) round these parts.

This allergy/olfactory thing is crazy. I always knew I had a poor sense of smell but my experiments in mixology eventually made me realize that my olfaction was fluctuating greatly day to day. One day I would try a recipe or create a recipe and would think it the best thing since sliced bread and then two weeks later the same recipe was very bland and boring. Eventually I put 2 and 2 together and decided to not see an allergist but to self medicate with OTC generic Claritin (loratadine), and what a difference! All the new smells! Many smells are not so good, unfortunately. So anyhow, in the past year I've made up a dozen+ drink recipes and now I have to go back and re-analyze those recipes. Not to mention that I have drank my way into the "P"s in Intoxica and Grog Log. I have to go back and try many of those again as well. Tough times ahead for me!

An odd and unforeseen effect of regaining some olfaction is that I seem to be wanting a little more lime juice in my drinks. Weird. I've ranted some here, and at great length in the privacy of my home, on the over abundance of lime and lemon in classic tiki drinks. I am now wondering if my previously poor sense of smell made me not experience some of the balancing effects of syrups and sweeter juices and flavors against the tart citrus? :-?

What's this Agwa stuff....?

Me wants to try a Jaguar God!

My friends went to Easter Island and they got me one of those Pisco Capel Moai bottles. I have photos of it and scans of the label with recipe on my blog.
http://populuxebooks.com/blog/index.php/2007/03/06/pisco_capel_moai_tiki_decanter

On 2005-04-01 18:54, Kono wrote:
OK, I tried my Pisco drink tonight, all jacked up on Claritin, and I thought is was pretty good. Actual user experience may vary

Jaguar God

My bottle of Pisco and AGWA arrived today, so I whipped one of these babies up after dinner. I'm so buzzed from the coca leaf extract in the AGWA, I'm afraid to have another one. Fantastic cocktail, Kono. Mahalo!

I just scored a Moai bottle of Pisco at Canal's Liquors near Egg Harbor Twp. in New Jersey. I havent seen it for sale anywhere else in the PA/NJ/DE area so I feel that I scored bigtime.