It was one day in September when I’d finally had enough.
Within seconds of each other, two separate PR firms sent me pitches involving the highball.
“The Highball’s Modern Resurgence Among Gen Z” touted one, talking about the “fresh, modern spins” and “elevated experiences” today’s bartenders have begun to put on the drink. The other pitch, received just eight seconds later, noted that “The humble highball has officially leveled up,” citing their clients making the simply mixed drink with everything from plum liqueur and raspberry lavender syrup to ones with cherry juice and butterfly pea tea.
The day before, Esquire had published a story titled, “Gen Z Doesn’t Drink Much. But When They Do, It’s This Cocktail.”
You guessed it: the highball.
“By definition, a highball features a 1:2 ratio of whisky to soda water poured into a tall glass and mixed,” wrote the author. “But bartenders are experimenting with that recipe to make increasingly intricate and fun cocktails.”
Isn’t the beauty of the highball how non-intricate it is?
Do all mixed drinks need to “level up”?
In a bar world of exacting Martini specs and ostentatious garnishes, do we really need to be overthinking the humble highball?
Okey Toki
“All of this talk about ‘the art of the highball’ has been extrapolated to slightly ridiculous proportions,” says Kendra Hada of ABV in San Francisco.
One day, the whiskey and soda was as little thought about as the rum and Coke or gin and tonic and then, suddenly, it seemed that brands and their publicists were trying to manipulate us into fetishizing the highball.
I, for one, blame Suntory.
“The Suntory Whisky Toki highball is recommended for those interested in experiencing how whisky is enjoyed in Japan today.”
Let’s go back to the mid-2010s. Suntory’s single malts, chiefly its Yamazaki line, have begun cleaning up at international spirits competitions. In both 2011 and 2012, Yamazaki distillery won best single malt at the World Whiskies Awards, while the Yamazaki Sherry Cask 2013 was named World’s Best Whisky in the 2015 edition of Jim Murray’s “Whisky Bible.” Pretty quickly, Yamazaki began selling for elevated prices on liquor store shelves and, even then, it was hard to find.
Suntory couldn’t keep up with demand for aged stocks and by 2016, then-CEO Takeshi Niinami had claimed it would take 10 years for the company to catch back up.
It’s not hard to speculate that Suntory needed a new product that wouldn’t take 12 or 18 or even longer years to be produced, one that could also always be on U.S. liquor store shelves, and at a fair price to boot.
Enter Suntory Whisky Toki, first released in June 2016. At only $39.99 it was way more affordable than the Yamazaki and Hakushu that clamoring consumers could no longer find. But that was because it was a non-age- stated blend from the company’s three distilleries: Yamazaki Distillery, Hakushu Distillery, and Chita Distillery, the latter a distillery that famously produces grain whisky.
This was not to say that the whisky was bad. It was just light, with notes of green apple, peaches, vanilla, and very little barrel character; it was something that demanded a little oomph.
“The Suntory Whisky Toki highball is recommended for those interested in experiencing how whisky is enjoyed in Japan today,” wrote Suntory’s press release at the time.
The Amazing, High Art
Indeed, Japan has long had a highball culture. Or, at least, for as long as Suntory has pushed for it.
That generally began post-World War II, when Suntory started opening its own bars throughout Japan to promote its own products. They were called Torys Bars and they encouraged a style of drinking known as Mizuwari (“cut with water”); the bar’s most popular drink soon became the Kakubin Highball, made with Kakubin (“square bottle”), a blended whiskey launched in 1937 and still sold in the country today.
Decades later, the highball still dominates drinking culture in Japan, where it is usually served at izakayas after work, and canned versions can be purchased from vending machines at train stations.
But, if the highball remains casual in Japan, when Toki arrived in the U.S., it was immediately elevated to an exotic, high-end drink. I remember early press events for Toki that were often held in Michelin-starred Japanese restaurants in Manhattan and where Toki highballs were served from their own special highball machine, a $7,000 tap-handle device that stored and then dispensed a chilled 3:1 ratio of water to whisky, the former at a carbonation supposedly some five times more pressurized than standard soda water. (As of 2017, reportedly only eight bars in America had the machine.)
Suntory was saying: This isn’t just a whisky and soda, this is something important.
“If the glass is cold, the ice is solid, and the carbonation’s right, you’ve already done most of the work. It doesn’t need to be overthought to be great.”
The gambit worked, and countless writers were seduced into writing about this new Suntory product and the importance of the highball, a trend that continues to this very day.
“The Japanese Way to a Better Highball,” wrote PUNCH in 2016.
“This Isn’t Your Father’s Whisky Soda,” wrote The Wall Street Journal in 2017.
There was “The Amazing Art of the Japanese Highball” (Liquor.com, 2017) and “The high art of the Japanese highball” (Club Oenologique, 2023). We’ve even written about it recently with “These Bartenders Are Redefining the Classic Japanese Highball.” Honestly, it’s hard not to.
“I think to an extent, we have to acknowledge that a lot of the articles that come out about highballs, while promoting a delicious drink, are also marketing for the systems and supplies required to make the drink,” says Hada. (Having said that, she does think bars should invest in CO₂ tanks and soda systems, not soda guns; preferably even force-carbonating the entire highball, not just the soda water.)
Are highballs better with soda water at the most perfect PSI, served over a clear Kold-Draft cube as long as the crystal highball glass it comes in, perhaps even garnished with a beautiful shiso leaf. Yes. Sure.
But have we needed articles about this for the last decade-plus?!
It’s Simple Really
“I love seeing bartenders get creative with highballs, but I think the beauty of the drink is in how simple it is,” says Benny Hurwitz, the American whiskey portfolio brand ambassador for Campari. “If the glass is cold, the ice is solid, and the carbonation’s right, you’ve already done most of the work. It doesn’t need to be overthought to be great.”
José Medina Camacho’s favorite highball at his bar, Adiõs, in Birmingham, Ala., is simply one ounce of bourbon and one ounce of Cardamaro topped with Sidral Mundet apple soda and a lemon twist.
“The highball doesn’t have to be anything too crazy,” he says. “Sure, elevate the thing, but don’t get pretentious. It should simply be a spirit or spirits with some carbonated drink.”
Bianca Carpino, the lead bartender at Sur Lie in Portland, Maine, believes, to a certain extent, the bar industry has run out of fresh ideas, so reimagination has become the name of the game.
“I admire anyone’s tenacity when they imagine anything, because any effort is appreciated, but yes, I can agree, it is just whiskey, soda water, and ice,” she says.
It’s my belief that a lot of drink creation these days is intentionally made to spawn press and social media engagement and, thus, this modern elevation of the highball hits a few tentpoles of clickable journalism: the continuing fascination with how you’re “supposed to” drink whiskey; the paradox of high brow/low brow drinks; the exoticism of “this is how a foreign country does something better than us Americans.”
“It’s not an esoteric drink found in the pages of a dusty bar manual. It can be made by anyone, anywhere. It’s booze and bubbles, it’s the most confident drink you can make.”
“This, I believe, is why we keep seeing articles about these ‘innovative and provocative’ highballs,” Carpino says. “And thus, of course, we had to over-complicate it with 10,000 versions of how to make it better.”
She saw the same thing happen with the Old Fashioned last decade, a simple drink that was suddenly being made more and more baroque. Even bartenders who have served elevated highballs over the years are ultimately admitting that maybe they were chasing a trend they shouldn’t have.
“My issue with the ‘elevated highball’ mindset is that I think it’s unnecessary,” says Matt Piacentini, the managing partner and director of operations at The Up & Up in New York. “The highball doesn’t need to be elevated or reinvented to be appreciated — it just needs to be made correctly, and enjoyed for what it is.”
Overthought and Overwrought
This is not to say that I haven’t had good “overthought” highballs over the last decade.
As Toki and the “better” highball arrived in the U.S. in the mid-2010s, so, too, did Japanese-style cocktail bars. Los Angeles had Wolf & Crane (opened in 2013), Chicago had Jim Meehan’s Prairie School (2017). In New York you had places like Bar Goto (2015) on the Lower East Side, Bar Moga (opened in 2017) on Houston Street in Manhattan, and Katana Kitten (2018), which has had a full highball menu since the day it opened, including a Toki Highball with lemon oil added to the standard spec.
They were, and (most) still do remain, great bars, worthy of the acclaim they have received. And all of them likewise make versions of the highball that are elevated, expensive, and, quite frankly, delicious, the pinnacle probably being Bar Goto’s $32 Yamazaki Highball.
Some elevated highballs these days aren’t even made with whiskey, like Katana Kitten’s Melon-Lime Soda, made with vodka, midori, lime, and matcha. Delicious! Likewise, it’s not just Japanese-style bars, either, that are elevating the highball. Superbueno’s very best cocktail is a highball, though one of the vodka variety called the Vodka y Soda. It’s also about as time-consuming as the drink can get. Bartender Ignacio “Nacho” Jiménez infuses Grey Goose with pasilla and guajillo pepper before combining it with Velvet Falernum and “water” made of clarified guava puree.
But those also cost $19.50 and $21.50 respectively, which starts to feel like a lot for a mere mixed drink.
“I think the beauty in the highball is its simplicity. It doesn’t need to be revived with a new personality. It’s not an esoteric drink found in the pages of a dusty bar manual. It can be made by anyone, anywhere. It’s booze and bubbles, it’s the most confident drink you can make,” says Jason Sorbet of the forthcoming Love’s Alibi in Nashville. “Give me a cheap blended [whisky] and ice cold soda water and let’s call it a day.”
And, ultimately, the best highball I’ve had in the past year was just that. Yes, it was a Toki highball. A couple ounces of the whisky, mixed with chilled mineral water, stirred over hand-cut ice. It didn’t make me think about anything, it didn’t reinvent the genre, but it was absolutely delicious.
“A highball is just that, a highball. Call it like it is,” says Carpino. “I admire people’s passion for their art, of course, but at the end of the day, putting whiskey in a glass with soda water isn’t going to revolutionize the bar industry.”
