How to Make This Fruity Brandy Cocktail

The Williams Fizz is many things: It is bright and refreshing, tart and fruity, broad and velvety, and is as good a drink for early autumn as exists on this earth. It is also, as the name suggests, a Fizz.

What’s a Fizz? Cocktail people don’t talk about Fizzes much these days, which is weird because it used to be that they couldn’t shut up about them. The Fizz used to be everywhere. From 1880 until at least 1930 it was a phenomenon, second in popularity only to the Cocktail (read: modern day Old Fashioned / Manhattan), and enjoyed wide acclaim—“one of the finest mixed drinks made” was a typical opinion, produced by C.F. Lawlor in 1897. Others were perhaps more poetic: “At any time or in any place where the tongue and throat are parched and dry,” wrote bartender Earnest Rawling in 1914, “when the spirits are jaded and the body is weary… it is then that [the Fizz] comes like a cooling breeze from the sea, bringing new life and the zest and joy of living.”

Upon tasting a particularly delicious Gin Fizz variation from Henry Ramos’s bar in New Orleans in 1895, a professional journalist simply declared bankruptcy on the English language itself: “What does this wonderful mixed drink taste like? You might as well ask for a description of a Mediterranean sunset… these are things that no person can adequately describe.”

So what is this love potion, about which people used to so gleefully rhapsodize? A Fizz is a spirit with lemon or lime, sugar, and soda water. That’s it. It was usually made with gin, but Fizz variations proliferated throughout every spirit and style. Silver Fizz used egg white. Golden Fizz used egg yolk. Then there was the aforementioned Ramos Gin Fizz—if you have ever heard of any Fizz, you’re probably thinking about this one—which calls for egg white, cream, and orange flower water. The Ramos Gin Fizz thrives as the last extant representative of the category, like Macy’s Herald Square or modern day Vienna, a decadent and baroque monument to a once-vast empire.

Key to understanding the Fizz—and understanding why the Williams Fizz is so unbelievably delicious—is to differentiate it from the Collins. Both are classic sours with soda water added. The difference is that the Fizz has no ice, because the Fizz has somewhere to be—namely, inside of you, as quickly as possible. Nearly every single recipe from the Fizz’s golden age takes pains to specify that it should be made very cold, served without ice, and consumed immediately after delivery, an instruction that may seem pedantic but is nonetheless ubiquitous. It’s the other way bartenders couldn’t stop talking about the Fizz: “drink without hesitation” (Jerry Thomas, 1876) and “see that your guest drinks it at once” (William Schmidt, 1892) and “bear in mind that all drinks called Fizz’s must be drank as soon as handed out” (Harry Johnson, 1888).

Enter the Williams Fizz, the dormant category reanimated by Toby Maloney, at Milk & Honey in 2003. He took unaged pear brandy, for urgent fresh autumnal fruit, and combined it with the warm oaked spice of an aged apple brandy. Lemon and sugar played their push-and-pull, an egg white neutralized the tannins from the oak, and the sparkling water—the “fizz”—lifted the flavors up, making them brighter, more aromatic, and more alive.

Can you put this on ice? Linger over it? Disobey? Sure. It’s still good. But ice, in addition to flattening the soda, will invite you to take longer, let it get diluted, and deflate the texture. Perhaps one of the reasons that the Fizz was so popular was that it was consumed directly after creation, when its flavor and temperature and texture were at their absolute peak. Perhaps after a properly made (and properly consumed) Williams Fizz or two, you won’t be able to shut up about it, either.

Williams Fizz

Add all ingredients except soda to a cocktail shaker without ice. Seal, hold tight, and “dry” shake for about 5 seconds to whip the egg white (a quick strong whisking can do this job as well). Then add ice, and shake good and hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain into a tall narrow glass (if you’ve got one) and top with 1-2 oz. fresh sparkling water. Express a lemon peel over the top and discard. Drink without hesitation.

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

Apple Brandy: The choice here is between American and French, and I’ll say both taste good, but I prefer French apple brandy, called Calvados. There’s a softer oak profile, and more rustic personality to shine through. It’s also worth noting I suppose that when made with Calvados, this cocktail had a different name, 41 Jane Does, an opaque reference and one that feels to me like bad taste, given that it implies some kind of monstrous catastrophe. So the Williams Fizz it is.

Pear Eau de Vie: This seems more exotic than it is: It is simply pears, fermented and distilled, and bottled clear, with no age. There are lots of great producers—here in America the benchmark is either Clear Creek or St. George, both from the Pacific Coast and both astoundingly good. There is also a long history of Eau de Vie in Europe, in particular Alsace and Austria, which tends to bring a little more funk to the table but still work well—in this, G.E. Massanez is the one I’ve worked with the most, and I highly recommend it.

Simple Syrup: A half cup of water and a half cup of white sugar, and put them in a bowl or pot. Stir. The hotter the water, the quicker the sugar will dissolve—anywhere from three minutes (room temp water) to 20 seconds (boiling water). Once dissolved, you’re done, bottle and refrigerate.

Egg White: Egg whites do four things: They add a velvety texture, a frothy head, bind to the tannins, and tame the funkiness of the spirits. They are highly recommended. You can use anything from a freshly cracked egg to pasteurized pre-separated cartons, both will achieve the goal you’re looking for. If you don’t eat eggs, you can use aquafaba (the liquid from a can of chickpeas), which adds a little more flavor than egg whites do but otherwise works similarly. Avoid bottled “cocktail foamers,” or methylcellulose, etc. All they do is give you the frothy head, most don’t help with any of the rest of it at all.