Amaretto Sour Recipe: Sweet, Sharp and Easy to Get Wrong

Key Takeaway

An amaretto sour is amaretto and fresh lemon juice, shaken hard over ice, with an optional egg white for silkiness. Get the ratio right, two parts amaretto to one part lemon, and it stops being a sweet novelty and becomes one of the best-balanced sours there is. Our house version, the Saranno Sour, rebuilds it around Shanty Seaweed Spiced Rum with peach, orange and a silky aquafaba foam.

The Almond Cocktail Everyone Underestimates

Say "amaretto sour" in some bars and you can watch the bartender's soul leave their body. The drink has a reputation: too sweet, too simple, the order of someone who does not really like cocktails.

The reputation comes from bad versions. Bottled sour mix, no fresh citrus, no texture. Made properly, with real lemon juice and a serious shake, it is a genuinely great drink, sweet and sharp in equal pull, with that bitter almond finish nothing else has.

Here is the amaretto sour recipe worth defending, and the twist we put on it in Poole.

What Goes in an Amaretto Sour

• 50ml amaretto
• 25ml fresh lemon juice
• 15ml egg white, optional but worth it
• Ice, plus a cherry and a strip of lemon peel to finish

That is the whole list. The 2:1 ratio of amaretto to lemon is the entire trick. Amaretto is a liqueur, already sweet, so unlike most sours this one needs no added sugar. The lemon does all the correcting.

Amaretto itself is an Italian liqueur with a bitter almond character, traditionally made from apricot kernels or almonds. Any good amaretto works here.

How Do You Make an Amaretto Sour?

1. Add the amaretto, lemon juice and egg white to a shaker with no ice, and shake hard for ten seconds. This "dry shake" is what builds the foam.
2. Add cubed ice and shake again until the tin is properly cold.
3. Strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass.
4. Rest the cherry on the foam and twist the lemon peel over the top.

Skipping the dry shake is the most common mistake. Egg white only turns into that smooth, bar-quality foam if it is shaken before the ice goes in. Ten seconds of effort, completely different drink.

No egg? Leave it out and you still have a clean, sharp sour. A spoonful of aquafaba, the liquid from a tin of chickpeas, foams almost identically if you want the texture without the egg.

Getting the Balance Right

Consider a scenario where you taste two amaretto sours in a row. The first was made with bottled sour mix: it hits sweet, stays sweet, and finishes like cough syrup. The second used 25ml of lemon squeezed a minute earlier: it opens sweet, snaps sharp in the middle, and the almond note arrives at the end where it belongs.

Same liqueur, same glass. Fresh lemon is not an upgrade to this recipe; it is the recipe. If you take one thing from this page, let it be that the citrus squeezer matters more than the shaker.

The Saranno Sour: Our House Recipe

At the distillery we take the sour somewhere the classic cannot go. The Saranno Sour leads with Shanty Seaweed Spiced Rum and lets the amaretto play the supporting role:

• 35ml Shanty Seaweed Spiced Rum
• 15ml amaretto
• 25ml peach syrup
• 15ml lemon juice
• 25ml orange juice
• 25ml aquafaba
• 2 dashes of Peychaud's Bitters

Dry shake everything hard for 15 to 20 seconds, add ice, shake again until properly cold, then double strain into a chilled coupe. Float a dehydrated orange slice on the foam.

Swapping the base to the rum changes the whole conversation of the drink. Its oak, raw Dorset honey and four hand-foraged British seaweeds give the almond a darker, faintly savoury backdrop, while the peach and orange keep it bright. Aquafaba does the foam work, so the house version is vegan as standard.

For more of the rum's dessert-adjacent side, try our Rumtini espresso martini serve, or see what it does in a tall glass with the Stormy Seas.

Conclusion

Two parts amaretto, one part fresh lemon, a hard dry shake, and the amaretto sour earns its place back. When you are ready to go further, the Saranno Sour and a bottle of Shanty Seaweed Spiced Rum are waiting.