The highball is not a way of making cheap whisky drinkable. It is the serve most Japanese blends were designed around, which is why a good one tastes more like itself with soda than it does neat. Suntory built Toki for it. Nikka's blends behave the same way.
Almost everything separating a good highball from a bad one happens before the whisky goes in. The glass, the soda and the whisky all want to be properly cold, the ice wants to be big and hard rather than small and wet, and the soda wants to be poured once, gently, and not stirred to death afterwards.
How to make it
What you need
- 45 mlJapanese blended whiskyA light blend with citrus and green apple rather than heavy sherry or peat. Smoke fights the soda.
- 135 mlchilled soda water
- 1 wide striplemon peel, or a grapefruit coin
- to fillhard, clear ice
1.5 standard drinks in total, 1.5 per serve, based on the recipe's alcohol strengths. Australian guidelines: no more than 10 a week, 4 on any day.
Method
- 01Chill the glass, the whisky and the soda.
- 02Fill the glass completely with ice.
- 03Add the whisky and stir thirteen times.
- 04Top up the ice, then pour the soda slowly down the side of the tilted glass.
- 05Stir once, vertically.
- 06Express the lemon peel over the drink, then drop it in.
What to make it with
Blended bottles in stock today, cheapest first. Prices are checked daily, so this is what the drink actually costs to build right now.
Where it comes from
Called a haiboru in Japan, the drink was pushed hard by Suntory from the late 2000s as a way back into a market that had turned away from whisky. It worked. The highball is now the default way whisky is drunk there, and much of the modern Japanese blend category is shaped around surviving contact with soda and ice.
It is also why age statements are beside the point here. A twenty year old malt makes a worse highball than a well built no age statement blend, because everything that makes the old bottle interesting gets flattened by carbonation.
Without the alcohol
Soda over ice with a long strip of grapefruit peel and two dashes of non-alcoholic bitters gets most of the way there: cold, dry and aromatic, without the spirit.