How to Make a Paper Plane Cocktail

The Paper Plane cocktail contains equal parts bourbon, lemon juice, the bitter orange aperitif Aperol, and the digestif Amaro Nonino Quintessentia. This bourbon cocktail tastes like a more complex whiskey sour, with its sweeter ingredients wonderfully complementing the sourness of the lemon juice.

Award-winning bartender Sam Ross created the Paper Plane cocktail in 2007 at the Violet Hour bar in Chicago. Ross—already well-known for inventing another popular modern cocktail, the Penicillin—conceived of the drink as a contemporary riff on the prohibition-era gin cocktail the Last Word. For the drink’s Italian liqueur component, Ross originally used Campari but soon switched to Aperol once he brought the cocktail to New York’s Milk & Honey bar (now called Attaboy). Ross named the cocktail after the hit M.I.A. earworm “Paper Planes,” which he listened to on repeat during the summer he developed the drink.