Paper Plane
The one you'll make twice
- Method
- Shaken
- Style
- Modern Classic
- Glass
- Nick and Nora
- Time
- 5 min
Ingredients
- 22.5mlBourbonOld Grandad Bonded recommended
No Bourbon? Rye Whiskey — drier and spicier — more bite, less of the vanilla sweetness
- 22.5mlAmaro Nonino
No Amaro Nonino? Amaro Montenegro — different, but still great
- 22.5mlAperol
- 22.5mlLemon Juice
Make it well
Shaken, properly.
Add the bourbon, Amaro Nonino, Aperol and lemon juice to your with ice.
for 10-12 seconds.
into a chilled coupe.
No garnish needed, this one's clean.
On the palate
On the nose you get the amaro first, bittersweet and herbal, with the Aperol's orange behind it. On tasting, equal parts means nothing gets to dominate, so it shifts on you: sometimes the bourbon leads, sometimes the amaro's bitterness elbows in. The lemon ties it together and keeps it clean. It finishes dry rather than sweet, and for four assertive ingredients in identical measures it drinks remarkably smooth. Deceptively easy, this one.
Where it came from
Sam Ross and Sasha Petraske built the Paper Plane in 2008 at Milk & Honey in New York, as a favour for their old colleague Toby Maloney, who wanted a summer drink for his Chicago bar The Violet Hour. It's a riff on the Last Word: keep that drink's equal-parts structure, change everything in it. The name came from M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes", which the two of them had on heavy rotation while they were working it out. It reached the Violet Hour's menu as the "Paper Airplane", because Maloney misheard the slightly buzzed voicemail Ross left him with the recipe. The spec shifted too. Ross's original called for Campari, and once he'd sent it over he had second thoughts, went back to it, and decided it was landing too bitter and not quite sweet enough. Aperol went in instead, and that's the version everyone makes now.
Keep pouring
If you like the Paper Plane, try these
The bartender’s note
One drink, one story, one bottle worth buying.
Thursday evening, so you have time to shop. No more than that.