Turn Your Gin Sour Into a Collins

A ratio and a recipe for a Universal Collins.

As summer draws to a close, the days are becoming shorter, but the drinks are growing longer. 

Here in Washington, D.C., the sunsets have started to arrive a little bit earlier, but it’s still muggy and often swelteringly hot outside. For weather like this, I often look to long drinks — cocktails lengthened by the addition of some sort of sparkling ingredient. 

Perhaps my favorite drink in this category is the Americano, which modifies and adapts the Negroni to the long-drink format, dropping the gin and adding a tall pour of sparkling water. 

But more recently, I’ve been making cocktails in the Tom Collins mold. These drinks are easy to make, with just a few ingredients — gin, some sort of syrup, lemon juice, and seltzer — you may already have around the house. Made with care, they’re delightfully effervescent with a pleasant balance of sweet, sour, and strong. 

The Tom Collins has sometimes been described as lemonade with the addition of gin. That’s not wrong, exactly, but I prefer to think of it as a gin sour with the addition of sparkling water. 

If you think of it that way, it means you can take your favorite basic gin sour — the Bee’s Knees, (a gin sour with honey syrup instead of sugar syrup), the Gimlet (a gin sour with lime juice), or just a plain old Gin Sour (gin, lemon, sugar syrup) — and turn it into a Collins-style drink by adding sparkling water. 

This is a fairly straightforward task. Indeed, it might sound so simple that it hardly requires a recipe. But this type of drink is greatly improved by the application of a bit of technique. 

Although many Collins recipes call for an unspecified amount of sparkling water “to top,” it’s important to measure or otherwise consistently pour the sparkling element in order to ensure that the drink maintains a proper balance. Similarly, it matters how you make the gin sour part of the drink. And the order of mixing and method of preparation matters too. 

So this week, we are going to work through the process of turning any basic gin sour into a fizzy, sparkly, delicious Collins that will keep you cool and refreshed through the dog days of summer. You can think of this as a universal Collins recipe, an all-purpose conversion kit for your favorite gin sour. 

Also, we will discuss measuring liquid with your eyeballs. 

Video Killed the Ratio Star

A lot of understanding cocktails just comes down to learning some basic ratios and formulas. One of the most common, most fundamental of those ratios is the sour — a combination of liquor, sour citrus (lime or lemon), and some sort of sweetener, which in most cases means sugar syrup.