Fizz vs. Spritz

The Silver and Golden Fiz cocktails, however, were shaken over ice, poured into a glass, and THEN topped off – and here’s the kicker – ONLY with seltzer water.

This tells us a few things. Obviously, to achieve the rich, desserty texture from the egg, you really need to shake the drink. This much should be clear to anyone who has worked with eggs in cocktails. But to me what’s more interesting is that Jerry Thomas knew that big bubbles – the kind you get from a seltzer gun – were the only thing to use in a rich, dessert- style cocktail if you want to achieve contrast with the other ingredients – in order to make the drink feel effervescent despite its heavy, sweet flavor profile.

If you want to learn more about egg-based drinks or the difference between sparkling water and seltzer water, head over to Episode 029 – Egg Cocktails, or Episode 099 – Bursting Bubbles. Also, if you do decide to head over to the show notes page for this episode to check out that PDF of Jerry Thomas’ Bar Tender’s Guide, the recipes I just mentioned are on pages 46 and 47 – which are pages 50 and 51 of the PDF document. The more you know.

Featured Cocktail: The Ramos Gin Fizz

Now, of course, I’d be remiss if I moved on without mentioning what’s probably the most iconic Fizz cocktail in the book – the Ramos Gin Fizz, invented by Henry C. Ramos of the Imperial Cabinet Bar in New Orleans in 1888 – one year after the final publication of The Professor’s Bar Tender’s Manual. This cocktail extends the fizz format by adding dairy (in the form of heavy cream) and orange blossom water to the recipe. It also modifies the process to generate an uncommonly rich head of foam on the drink by employing a method called the “dry shake,” where some drink components of the cocktail are beat up in the shaker without ice to begin denaturing the egg whites without the unhelpful presence of ice or dilution.

To make it, you’ll need:

• 2 ounces gin

• 1/2 ounce lemon juice

• 1/2 ounce lime juice

• 1/2 ounce simple syrup (1:1, sugar:water)

• 3 dashes orange flower water

• 1 ounce heavy cream

• 1 egg white

• 2 ounces soda water

Featured Cocktail: The Ramos Gin Fizz

Now, of course, I’d be remiss if I moved on without mentioning what’s probably the most iconic Fizz cocktail in the book – the Ramos Gin Fizz, invented by Henry C. Ramos of the Imperial Cabinet Bar in New Orleans in 1888 – one year after the final publication of The Professor’s Bar Tender’s Manual. This cocktail extends the fizz format by adding dairy (in the form of heavy cream) and orange blossom water to the recipe. It also modifies the process to generate an uncommonly rich head of foam on the drink by employing a method called the “dry shake,” where some drink components of the cocktail are beat up in the shaker without ice to begin denaturing the egg whites without the unhelpful presence of ice or dilution.

To make it, you’ll need:

• 2 ounces gin

• 1/2 ounce lemon juice

• 1/2 ounce lime juice

• 1/2 ounce simple syrup (1:1, sugar:water)

• 3 dashes orange flower water

• 1 ounce heavy cream

• 1 egg white

• 2 ounces soda water

Combine all ingredients except soda water in a cocktail shaker with NO ice, and make sure you really maintain the seal with your hands – otherwise, you’re gonna be wearing most of the drink. Give that a good, solid shake for at least 15-20 seconds (or until you hear and feel the consistency of the drink begin to change in the shaker). At this point, add your ice and shake for a further 15-20 seconds before straining into a highball glass, topping with soda, garnishing optionally with half an orange wheel, and enjoying it through a straw.

To me, the Ramos Gin Fizz is the Apotheosis – the high water mark – of the fizz family. It attains a level of decadence hinted at by Jerry Thomas’ Silver and Golden Fiz cocktails, while still fitting comfortably within a category that started with a little booze, a little sugar, a little citrus, and some bubbles.

So, when the Austrian soldiers would sit down at a cafe in Milan or Venice, they might very well order a glass of the native wine, but they’d request a “Spritz” of water (either flat or sparkling) to help it fit their palates.

To me, this version of a Spritz really can’t be considered a cocktail. It’s just wine and water – and I hate to break it to you folks, but wine is already mostly water. For my money, the Spritz doesn’t achieve its true power until the mid-20th century – several decades after the birth of Aperol – the popular Italian Aperitif sporting notes of sweet and bitter orange.

Modeled somewhat after French Aperitifs like Dubonnet, Aperol was a natural fit for bubbles (both winey and watery), which help cut through the bitterness and sweetness to lift the flavor profile. And to be fair, people were spritzing other aperitifs long before the Aperol Spritz came along – but the Aperol Spritz just seems to have done it better.

For my money, the best recipe for an Aperol Spritz (and there are a lot of them out there) is as follow:

• 3 oz Prosecco (a dry, white sparkling wine from Italy)

• 2 oz Aperol

• 1 oz Club soda or Seltzer Water

Fill up a stemmed wine glass halfway with ice, add the ingredients in descending order of volume (so first the Prosecco, then the Aperol, and then the soda), then give a gentle stir to combine them and garnish with half an orange slice.

To me, the Aperol Spritz is a cocktail because it’s more than just wine with water, or wine with bubble water, or even an aperitif with bubble water. The combined ABV of the Aperol and the Prosecco is more potent than anything you’d find in the early 19th century, and you have this delicate balance of sweetness, bitterness, and acidity going on that you wouldn’t find in just a sparkling aperitif beverage.

Characteristics of Spritzes

So, using the Aperol Spritz as the model for what the spritz should be as a cocktail category, the defining characteristics are:

• Light booziness – either from a robust aperitif or a combination of a light aperitif and a wine or fortified wine. Remember, we can’t leave vermouth out of the equation here.

• Sweetness – again from the aperitif and any wine-based modifiers

• And finally, Bubbles – from carbonated water and/or sparkling wine

How to Tell a Fizz from a Spritz

And if we place this definition of the spritz alongside our definition of a fizz, the main differences appear to be that

1. Spritzes don’t contain citrus. If there’s acidity, it comes primarily from wine.

2. Spritzes generally have a bitter component, which is not the case with the fizz category

3. Spritzes are generally built and stirred over ice – much like the brandy and gin fizz, but very unlike the silver, golden, or Ramos Gin Fizz.

And this is where I think people get a little confused between the Spritz and the Fizz category. They’re both light and refreshing (albeit for slightly different reasons). They both have some component to offset the sweetness in the drink. For Fizzes that’s acidity and sometimes texture from an egg component, and for Spritzes it’s bitterness and the heavy influence of bubbles (sometimes from two sources).

Is there some overlap in the Venn diagram? Yeah – a tiny sliver. For example, if you made a cocktail that contained something like limoncello, a half measure of gin or vodka, and sparkling water served over ice and garnished with a squeezed orange slice, you could make the argument that it’s either a lightly acidic fizz, or a spritz that’s suffering from a lack of bitterness. But really that’s about as close as these two categories come to overlapping. They’re gazing at one another as though through a pane of glass, able to communicate, but never able to touch.

Now, of course, this is a mocktail, so we have to take the booze out of the equation and really analyze the balance and the service style to figure out which camp it falls into.

For my money, the fact that this drink contains a wine reference (from the Aperitif), a healthy dose of bubbles, a fruit garnish and no sign of shaking, citrus, or egg places this solidly in the spritz camp. However, the acetic acid derived from the vinegar in the shrub is definitely a bit of an oddball – you’re really not gonna see much of that in the spritz world. So if there’s anything fizzy about it, it’s the vinegar, but that aside, I’m chalking this one up as a win for the Spritz family.

So Charlie, the Team at Lyre’s, I hope this was at least a little useful to you as you consider where your various creations can fit into these two bright, bubbly cocktail categories, and for all you listening out there, I hope you can return to this episode if you ever need a little refresher on what makes these two categories both separate and – for the most part – distinct.