Enjoy a julep, but beware the bourbon content

Friday, May 4, 2007 | 7:06 a.m.

Mint julep recipe

3 oz Kentucky bourbon whiskey

4 to 6 sprigs mint leaves

Simple syrup (sugar and water), to taste (about 1 oz)

Serve in a tall glass or julep cup over crushed or shaved ice and garnish with mint leaves. Some mix a mint syrup the night before, boiling the sugar and water, adding gently bruised mint leaves and chilling overnight. Others put bourbon, mint and syrup into the bottom of the glass and then let stand to release the mint flavor. Then add ice and more bourbon.

Virgin julep

Sweetened tea

Mint leaves, lemon and lime to taste

You don't need to drink alcohol to enjoy the Derby spirit. If you make up a batch of iced tea, eight to 10 mint leaves plus the juice of a lemon and a lime should be about right. Many Southerners boil the sugar in the water to start their sweetened tea. It may be sacrilege, but the recent Yankee invasion means you can get unsweetened tea in many Southern restaurants.

Walker Percy's favorite

In his "Bourbon," Southern writer Walker Percy warns against the mint julep: "They are drunk so seldom that when, say, on Derby Day somebody gives a julep party, people drink them like cocktails, forgetting that a good julep holds at least 5 ounces of bourbon. Men fall face-down unconscious, women wander in the woods disconsolate and amnesiac, full of thoughts of Kahlil Gibran and the limberlost."

Still, the essay's postscript includes "Cud'n Walker's Uncle Will's Favorite Mint Julep Receipt":

"You need excellent bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water. Next, very quickly - and here is the trick in the procedure - crush your ice, actually powder it, preferably with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything else, with bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the top. The glass will frost immediately. Then settle back in your chair for half an hour of cumulative bliss."

- Mark Whittington