Whisky Highball
Prep time:
In Japan they treat it with the seriousness of a classic, and rightly so: built properly it is the most refreshing long drink there is with a dark spirit.
Ingredients
- 45 ml Japanese or soft blended whisky
- 135 ml very cold soda water
- Long ice cubes
- Lemon twist (optional)
Preparation
- Chill the glass first. Everything in this drink fights heat.
- Fill the glass to the rim with ice and stir a few seconds to chill it. Pour off any water that forms.
- Add the whisky and stir thirteen times, the number they repeat in Tokyo bars. It sounds like superstition; what it does is chill the spirit before the fizz arrives.
- Pour the soda down the side of the glass, slowly, without hitting the ice.
- One single turn of the spoon, from the bottom up. Not one more.
Bartender’s notes
What makes the Japanese highball different?
An obsession with cold and with the bubble. In Japan the highball is not treated as a lesser drink but as the normal way to drink whisky, which is why the method is so worked out. Everything is ice-cold before you start: the glass, the whisky and the soda. And there is a step you will not see at any other bar — before adding the soda, the ice is stirred about thirteen times to round off its edges. A sharp edge bursts the bubbles on contact, so smooth ice holds the gas considerably longer. It sounds like fussiness and you can taste it in the glass. The soda goes down the side of the glass and gets a single turn, from the bottom up, so the whisky lifts without losing its fizz.
Do you need Japanese whisky?
No, but it is easy to see why the two go together. Japanese blends — Suntory’s Toki is the one most often asked for here — are built to be diluted: soft, unpeated and with a citrus edge that survives soda water rather than vanishing into it. A gentle blended Scotch does the same job for less. What does not work is a peated Islay: the smoke concentrates as you lengthen it and the drink stops being refreshing, which is its entire reason for existing.
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