National Whiskey Sour Day

I kid you not, today is National Whiskey Sour day. There's a lot of mumbo-jumbo on the web linking the classic sour to scurvy treatments administered shipboard during the 1700s, but to me that explanation sounds more than a little contrived.

Ships provided their crewmen rations of grog as a part of their pay, this much is true. Grog is a combination of small (weak) beer and some other spirit such as rum. By 1707 whiskey had become exorbitantly expensive due to the Acts of Union which merged England and Scotland and in 1725 the price of whiskey rose even more due to malt taxes. With whiskey fetching such a high price (whether it was legally produced or bootleg) no ship's captain would waste a bottle of the stuff on keeping their powder monkey fit.

In 1740 the British Navy began adding citrus juice (usually lemon or lime juice) to the recipe for grog, but this addition was merely intended to make what essentially was spoiled beer and rancid water more palatable. This addition, though they did not understand why, resulted in healthier sailors. In 1747 James Lind proved scurvy could be treated and prevented by supplementing the sailor's diet with citrus fruit and in 1753, Lind published A Treatise of the Scurvy, explaining how scurvy could be eradicated. His attempted to market lime juice as a medicine proved unsuccessful though and citrus wasn't adopted as a scurvy treatment until the 1790s, and the idea that any acid would suffice continued in Britain into the late 19th century.

To put it simply regardless of what About.com says, the whiskey sour was not invented to stave off scurvy nor was it served on any ship prior to the advent of the ocean liner.

Let us check a more reputable reference, say The Cocktail Chronicles blog which states:

"While not fancy, the whiskey sour has a history: It belongs to one of the old families of original cocktails, appearing in Jerry Thomas’ 1862 drinks book alongside the other cocktail ancestors, the juleps, slings, sangarees, cobblers and smashes that are mostly lost to the ages."