Penicillin
Blended Scotch, lemon, honey and ginger, floated with a peated single malt.
CC BY-SA 4.0 · Cropped, white-balanced, graded and re-encoded to WebP by eXir.
A Penicillin cocktail in a rocks glass over ice, golden in colour, garnished with a piece of candied ginger
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
60 ml blended Scotch- 15 ml honey syrupInterchangeable by volume, but honey syrup carries its own floral sweetness that a plain sugar syrup does not, so the drink comes out thinner and more purely smoky-sour without it.flavour: moderate change · strength: no change · sweetness: no change
- 7.5 ml ginger syrup
- 7.5 ml Islay single malt
Glass
Vessel
169 ml of liquid plus 130 ml of cubed ice occupies about 299 ml, inside the 300 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
5 steps · 1m 52sSqueeze the 23 ml fresh lemon juice and strain out the pips and pulp.
Combine the 60 ml blended Scotch, the 23 ml fresh lemon juice, the 15 ml honey syrup and the 7.5 ml ginger syrup in a shaker and fill it with cubed ice.
Shake hard for 12s.
Strain over a single large cube in a rocks glass.
Pour the 7.5 ml Islay single malt over the back of a spoon so it settles on the surface as its own layer.
The Islay malt is poured last, over the back of a spoon, so it sits as a layer on the surface rather than mixing straight in. The first sip meets its smoke before the rest of the drink; by the last sip the two have merged.
Common pitfallPouring the float straight down the middle of the glass sinks it into the drink instead of sitting it on top, and the layering that makes the first sip smoky and the rest honeyed is lost in one pour.
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 2005 New York cocktail built as a direct rework of an earlier Milk & Honey drink, the Gold Rush, and now cited as one of the most widely served new cocktails of the century since.
Australian bartender Sam Ross created the drink in 2005 while working at Milk & Honey in New York 1. It began as a variation on the Gold Rush, an earlier Milk & Honey drink built from bourbon, honey syrup and lemon juice 2. Ross replaced the bourbon with a mellow blended Scotch, cut the honey syrup with fresh ginger juice, and finished the drink with a float of Islay single malt poured over the top, adding a different bottle at a different point in the same build rather than changing the base spirit outright 2.
The name refers to the antibiotic, discovered by the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming, and trades on the drink's honey, ginger and Scotch reading like a cold remedy rather than on any actual medicinal claim 1. The float is the detail most often singled out: tasted before the rest of the drink has had a chance to mix in, it delivers a concentrated hit of peat smoke that softens sip by sip as the layers merge 2.
The drink spread from New York to London and from there to bars worldwide, and the writer Robert Simonson has called it the most widely travelled new cocktail of the twenty-first century 2. By 2024 it ranked among the most commonly ordered cocktails globally, nineteen years after it was first poured 1.
- 1Penicillin (cocktail)en.wikipedia.org
- 2Anatomy of a Penicillin — how to make a Scotch cocktail true to the originalcluboenologique.com