Paper Plane

Taste

Bourbon's caramel and oak sit against Amaro Nonino's bittersweet apricot-and-herb complexity, Aperol brings bright bitter orange and that distinctive orange-red hue, and lemon ties the whole thing together with a clean tartness. Equal parts across the board means nothing fully dominates, it shifts sip to sip: sometimes the bourbon leads, sometimes the amaro's bitterness comes through. Finishes dry rather than sweet, and drinks a lot smoother than four assertive ingredients in equal measure has any right to.

Origin

Sam Ross created the Paper Plane in 2007 at the Violet Hour in Chicago, conceived as a modern take on the equal-parts structure of the Prohibition-era Last Word. He named it after M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes," which he had on repeat that summer. His first version used Campari rather than Aperol, but after a couple of days testing he swapped it in for a better balance, and that's the recipe that stuck. The name itself comes from a slightly buzzed 3am voicemail Ross left a colleague with the recipe, which got misheard as "the Paper Airplane" before it settled into "Paper Plane." It spread fast from Milk & Honey and Little Branch in New York and is now firmly established as a modern classic.