Cocktail: Paper Plane

Go ahead M.I.A., take a sip of the Paper Plane.

Tuesday when I wrote about the Death & Co cocktail book, I included a recipe for the Naked and Famous, which the book describes as a cross between a Last Word and a Paper Plane. Curious about the Paper Plane, I looked it up.

As a refresher, the Last Word is a classic cocktail I wrote about a year ago. One of its great features is its equal proportions of four ingredients: 3/4 ounces each of gin, Green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur and lemon, which makes for a wonderfully tart and sweet drink. The Naked and Famous is similarly structured with 3/4 ounces each of Yellow Chartreuse, Aperol, lime and mezcal--so it's also got that tart/sweet thing but a bit savory too from the smoky mezcal.

So it's appropriate that the Paper Plane skews even darker with bourbon and Italian bitter-sweet amaro. The drink was created by Sam Ross for West Village bar Little Branch and is named after the 2007 hit song by M.I.A. If the name sounds familiar, you might have read my post about his Penicillin cocktail during my summer drinks week. Again, it's got that 3/4 ounces of four ingredients thing going on, in this case bourbon, Aperol, lemon and amaro. The recipe I found on Food & Wine calls for Nonino Quintessentia amaro. I used Amaro Montenegro instead, since that's what I had on hand. 

Paper Plane

Adapted from a recipe by Sam Ross

3/4 oz. bourbon

3/4 oz. Italian amaro (such as Nonino Quintessentia or Amaro Montenegro)

3/4 oz. Aperol

3/4 oz. lemon juice

Combine bourbon, amaro, Aperol and lemon juice in a cocktail shaker. Add ice and shake until very cold. Strain into a chilled coupe. No garnish.