Paper Plane
Bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino and lemon, in four equal parts.
CC BY 4.0 · Cropped, white-balanced, graded and re-encoded to WebP by eXir.
A Paper Plane cocktail served up in a coupe, orange-red in colour, garnished with a folded paper airplane
Serving
Drink spec, per drink
Every figure above is per drink and does not move with the count, which is what makes the two service modes comparable. Sugar per litre, strength and standard drinks stay in the units their own authorities publish, because they are figures for comparing rather than for pouring. Dilution is modelled rather than measured, as a fraction of the poured volume before any ice; dotted figures descend from that estimate.
Diet and allergen labels are computed from the ingredients listed on this page and nothing else. They cannot account for cross-contamination or for the particular product you buy, and they are not medical or safety guidance.
Ingredients
23 ml fresh lemon juice
23 ml bourbon
23 ml Amaro NoninoProprietary
23 ml AperolProprietaryInterchangeable by volume, but roughly twice the strength and far more bitter and less sweet, so the drink comes out shorter, drier and more assertive rather than merely differently flavoured.flavour: significant change · strength: minor change · sweetness: moderate change
- 23 ml fresh lemon juice
- 23 ml bourbon
- 23 ml Amaro NoninoProprietary
- 23 ml AperolProprietary
- ~45 ml water
Glass
Vessel
135 ml of liquid, served without ice, inside the 180 ml the glass holds. The build fails if a recipe ever exceeds its stated vessel.
A batch needs a vessel that closes and fits a fridge shelf.
Method
4 steps · 1m 37sSqueeze the 23 ml fresh lemon juice and strain out the pips and pulp.
Combine the 23 ml bourbon, the 23 ml Amaro Nonino, the 23 ml Aperol and the 23 ml fresh lemon juice in a shaker and fill it with cubed ice.
All four measures are the same size. Nothing here is a modifier of anything else: bourbon, bitter aperitivo, grape-based amaro and lemon carry equal weight, the same idea the Last Word applies to gin.
Shake hard for 12s. Four equal measures chill and dilute exactly as fast as any other shaken sour.
Double strain into a chilled coupe, catching the ice shards the shake has broken off.
Common pitfallAmaro Nonino and Aperol sit near each other on the shelf and both come in a similarly bright bottle; swapping one for the other by mistake loses the drink's grape-and-oak backbone rather than just its colour.
Keeping and make-ahead
Batched ahead, this keeps sealed and cold. The water line the engine adds is the dilution figure from the spec panel, not a rule of thumb.
About
A 2008 equal-parts cocktail built by Sam Ross as a deliberate answer to the Last Word, and one of the few modern drinks to reach classic status inside its own creator's working life.
Sam Ross built the drink in 2008 at the request of his former colleague Toby Maloney, who wanted a new cocktail for Maloney's own bar, The Violet Hour, in Chicago 1 2. Ross conceived it as an equal-parts riff on the Last Word, the pre-Prohibition cocktail Seattle bartender Murray Stenson had recently returned to circulation, keeping that drink's four-way structure but rebuilding it around bourbon, an Italian bitter aperitivo, a grape-based amaro and lemon rather than gin, herbal liqueur, maraschino and lime 1 2.
The recipe changed within days of being written. Ross's first version used Campari; tasting it again, he found it too bitter and not sweet enough, and swapped in Aperol instead, arriving at the bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino and lemon combination served today 2. The name comes from the M.I.A. song "Paper Planes," which Ross had on repeat while working out the recipe 1; when Maloney first put it on his menu he listed it as "paper airplane," having misheard Ross's voicemail 2.
Ross began serving his own version at Milk & Honey and Little Branch in New York at the same time it appeared in Chicago 2. It spread quickly enough to draw its own imitators, including Joaquín Simó's mezcal riff the Naked and Famous, and in 2020 the International Bartenders Association added it to its official list of cocktails under the "New Era Drinks" category. That was recognition inside little more than a decade of the drink's invention 1 2.
- 1Paper plane (cocktail)en.wikipedia.org
- 2How the Paper Plane Became a Modern Classicpunchdrink.com