Paper Plane

Taste

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.

Origin

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.