How To Make A Pineapple Whiskey Summer Cocktail With Just 3 Ingredients

Mixing pineapple with whiskey may not be quite as popular as adding it to rum, but the two powerful flavors work surprisingly well together, delivering something that's somehow both tropical and mellow. But when you want to seriously upgrade both, reach for some lemon juice and create a summery take on a classic Kentucky Lemonade.

Lemonade is one of the best mixers for bourbon, but using lemon juice instead balances the sweetness to a more moderate level. Your alcohol should have enough natural sugar to cut the acidity of your two fruity ingredients — plus, there are plenty of cheap bourbons that taste more expensive than they actually are. The idea is to create a base that's similar to a low-effort whiskey sour, full of dynamic sweet and sour notes that make the cocktail more complex. If you want to achieve that foam, however, it all depends on how you mix in the third ingredient.

Pineapple contains a high number of enzymes with an unintended side effect: They capture air when you shake the juice. By adding all the ingredients into a shaker with ice and giving it a thorough mixing, you create foam similar to egg white in a whiskey sour but with a far more tropical taste. If you want to up the sweetness, feel free to use syrup from canned fruit instead or swap in lemonade rather than lemon juice.

While this cocktail is highly customizable, it also maintains a delicate balance between three potent ingredients. Maintaining a ratio of four parts pineapple juice, two and a half parts bourbon, and one part lemon juice ensures you can taste all the ingredients equally, so you may be better off adding new flavors rather than increasing existing ones to maintain its complexity.

Like more classic versions of a whiskey sour, this drink isn't complete without a cherry. Your best bet is to use an amarena variety — those dark fruits in a thick syrup that straddle the line between sweet, sour, and bitter. Not only do they add a bit of dichotomous color to an otherwise brightly colored drink, but their balanced flavor profile helps preserve the nuance of your cocktail without tilting it too far towards any one flavor. Giada de Laurentiis uses it to give her old-fashioned an Italian flair, relying on the minor notes of acidity to balance her sweet cocktail.

If you opt to use sweeter ingredients, such as pineapple juice with added sugar or lemonade, you can still maintain the flavor profile with another great bar staple: dehydrated lemon. Drying citrus tends to concentrate its flavor, particularly its acidity. When rehydrated in a cocktail, it releases that taste quite quickly without adding any liquid, essentially seasoning your cocktail back to a solid balance with no more effort than dropping a slice into your glass.