A Bittersweet Campari Sour for Valentine’s Day

It's a drink. It's a metaphor. It's easy, delicious, comforting, and complex.

The Feast of Saint Valentine is yet again upon us. In previous years I have recommended drinks like the Jack Rose and the Pink Lady. For this year, may I suggest a simple, bittersweet Campari Sour? 

Much of the drink’s holiday-specific appeal can be explained by its color: The main elements of the drink are Campari, lemon juice, and syrup, so it pours a flowery, reddish pink. On Valentine’s Day, a Campari Sour just looks the part. 

But the drink is surprisingly delicious as well, bittersweet and complex, a little bit strange and perhaps even a challenge to some preconceptions — but fundamentally comforting. At the risk of overstating the metaphor, it’s a bit like love itself. 

This is a simple drink with just three core ingredients. In many ways, it’s structured like a sort of Campari Daiquiri, except with Campari and lemon instead of rum and lime. But there are some ways to dress it up as well, giving it just a bit more mystery and balance in the process.

You might think that an Italian bittersweet liqueur like Campari would be an odd fit for the base ingredient of a sour. And, well, that’s not wrong. It is a little bit odd. But this sort of bittersweet, intensely flavored liqueur works surprisingly well in the sour format, giving it depth and herbal-spiced complexity while keeping the familiar sweet and sour elements. 

In the past, I’ve published recipes for Jägermeister-based Margaritas and Cynar-forward sours: The Campari Sour has a familial relationship to those drinks, and if you like that sort of thing, this drink will probably be for you. 

Another way to think of this drink is as a sort of sour for Negroni fans. It takes the Negroni’s signature bittersweet element and puts it in the lead role, balancing it with acidic citrus juice and thick sugar syrup. When made properly, there’s a pleasant weight and texture to the drink along with an intriguing array of flavors. It’s delicious, in other words, and it looks good too.

The No-Frills Version

A very basic Campari Sour looks like this: 

Campari Sour 

• Scant ¾ ounce rich (2:1) simple syrup*

• ¾ ounce fresh lemon juice

• 2 ounces Campari

INSTRUCTIONS 

1. Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker.

2. Add ice, then shake for 10-12 seconds. 

3. Strain into a coupe or Nick & Nora glass. 

*Rich (2:1) simple syrup: Combine two parts sugar and one part water by weight — for example, 400 grams sugar and 200 grams water — in a blender. Blend for 2-3 minutes until full integrated. Bottle and store in the fridge. Keeps for a month or more.

The 8:3:3 (base spirit:citrus:syrup) ratio should be familiar to longtime readers. It’s one of the most commonly used sour formats, and it hews closely to one of my essential cocktail structures. In this case, I cut the syrup portion just a tiny bit — hence the “scant ¾ ounce” — in order to compensate for Campari’s inherent sweetness. But Campari more or less balances itself out, so the syrup is mostly countering the sour citrus aspect here. 

Veruca Salt

Like I said, the recipe above is for a very basic Campari Sour. It’s quite tasty without any modification. However, it is somewhat intense, allowing the earthy, vegetal notes of Campari to push through rather aggressively.

So the first addition I make to this drink is a few drops of homemade 20 percent saline solution — salt water that brightens the flavor profile and helps some of the lighter elements pop. Salt also cuts the bitterness somewhat, making this drink read as more floral. 

We’ve used saline solution many times in this newsletter, but for newer readers unfamiliar with it, it’s just a mix of 1 part salt and 4 parts water, heated on the stove then stirred until integrated.

I keep saline solution in a small dropper bottle, which makes it easy to dispense. Just three to four drops makes a significant difference in the drink’s character. If you’re the sort of person who enjoys A/B testing cocktails and learning how different elements affect the taste, I would encourage you to make this drink both with and without saline to see how saline changes this drink. (Alternatively, if you don’t want to make multiple iterations, you can make the drink without saline, then drop a bit of saline into the mix after your first taste.)

In any case, that gives us the following spec:

Campari Sour 

• 4 drops 20% saline solution**

• Scant ¾ ounce rich (2:1) simple syrup*

• ¾ ounce fresh lemon juice

• 2 ounces Campari

INSTRUCTIONS 

1. Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker.

2. Add ice, then shake for 10-12 seconds. 

3. Strain into a coupe or Nick & Nora glass. 

**Saline solution: Combine 1 part salt with 4 parts water, by liquid volume measure, in a small saucepan on the stove. Heat at medium-low to medium, stirring gently. Do not let boil. When fully integrated (there’s no salt sludge at the bottom of the pan), bottle in a dropper bottle. Shelf stable. Keeps for many months.

This is a very nicely balanced drink with a pleasant pop of salty-sweet-sour flavors. The various non-bitter elements of the Campari come through more prominently. The syrup and citrus are still in harmony. 

The Case for Adding Bénédictine

But if you want to take this one step further, you can try adding a small amount of another element — specifically, a single teaspoon of, well, something. 

The just-add-a-teaspoon strategy is somewhat underrated amongst home bartenders. But it works quite often to add a sly, unexpected flavor to a drink. Like so many cocktail-making strategies, this one has an analog in music: If you listen to a certain kind of intricate pop music act on high-quality speakers — think sonically dense acts like Radiohead or Fiona Apple or Nine Inch Nails or even Billie Eilish¹ — you’ll notice a profusion of tiny sonic textural elements that are almost but not quite hidden in the background adding just a little something extra that you might not even notice on first listen. Pay close attention and you’ll realize that various eclectic sounds and musical elements have been carefully layered on top of each other, adding an almost subliminal multi-dimensionality.

You can employ a similar strategy when making cocktails, adding small amounts of interesting or unusually flavored spirits to give a cocktail more layers and greater depth of flavor. 

We’ve seen this strategy before in drinks like the Admiral Morris Scotch Old Fashioned, which combines multiple types of Scotch whisky with a teaspoon of high-proof, super-funky Jamaican rum. The just-add-a-teaspoon trick is also a big part of what makes the Vieux Carre work: The Carre is really just a split-base Manhattan topped with a teaspoon of the sweet-and-spiced liqueur we’ve looked at over the last two weeks, Bénédictine.

As it happens, a teaspoon of Bénédictine works wonders in the Campari Sour as well, giving the drink a smidgen of wintry, spice-rack depth. It’s not strictly necessary, so don’t feel like you can’t make this cocktail if you don’t already have a bottle of Bénédictine on your bar cart. (Although, as I argued last week, Bénédictine is an incredibly versatile shelf-stable sweetener that you should probably keep around!)

But if you have a bottle, try adding a teaspoon to this mix. The result is something a little bit strange, a little bit unusual, but also complex and comforting, buoyed by a novel element you might not have expected to enter the mix.

As a Valentine’s Day metaphor — well, I’ll just let you think about that one. As a cocktail, it speaks for itself. 

Valentine’s Day Sour 

• 4 drops 20% saline solution**

• Scant ¾ ounce rich (2:1) simple syrup*

• ¾ ounce fresh lemon juice

• 1 teaspoon Benedictine

• 2 ounces Campari

INSTRUCTIONS 

1. Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker.

2. Add ice, then shake for 10-12 seconds. 

3. Strain into a coupe or Nick & Nora glass.  

Valentine’s Dogs

1. I am of the opinion that close listening and close tasting are inherently related: In both cases, you’re trying to isolate specific elements and hear or taste through complex layers of sensory information while also gauging the texture or timbre of the thing. There’s a reason we often refer to flavors as “notes,” and words like “muddled” get used for both cocktails and musical recordings when the elements aren’t clear enough. This is also one reason why listening to music while consuming a drink can be so enjoyable — you’re stimulating parallel sensory systems.