PenicillinĪdd blended scotch, lemon juice, and ginger-honey syrup to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake for six to eight seconds. It’s a way to flirt with disaster but stay safe, so you can say things like “it’s like if you liquified an ashtray” or “it’s like being slapped in the face with a smoked fish,” but mean it, you know, in a good way. ![]() Take a sip of something like Laphroig neat, and it’s an oily blast of smoke and salt and flavors like, as one woman says, “an elastic bandage.” However, position just a hint of that flavor next to something equally loud like ginger, and something soothing like honey, with a broad backbone of mild scotch and the brightness of fresh lemon, and it becomes a caged tiger, still wild but made accessible to more or less everyone. The particular magic of the Penicillin is that it presents that flavor, but de-fangs it. If you can’t handle it, well, too bad for you. As those ads illustrated, if you like it, you’re in the club. If it’s not for everyone, well then, all the better. The reason this works so well-the reason Laphroig had so much success with their bizarre advertising experiment-is that there’s something inherently appealing about big aggressive flavors. And finally, the true genius move, he grabbed a bit of peaty scotch-the aforementioned smoky, medicinal, polarizing flavor-and layered just a bit on top, for aroma. Good, but a bit too mild, he cut the honey in half and appended it with a ginger syrup, making a whiskey sour warm with honey and spicy with ginger-the kind of thing your grandma might recommend for everything from indigestion to cholera. First he replaced the bourbon with a mild blended scotch, which reduces the oaky punch and its commensurate sweetness. To understand the Penicillin, let’s begin with a Gold Rush ( bourbon, lemon, and honey) as Ross did in 2005 when he was toying around with it. The Penicillin, much like the antibiotic for which it is named, is everywhere. Today you can walk into any cocktail bar in the world and confidently order one, whether in New York or New Orleans or Naples or Nassau. It wasn’t ordered by James Bond or featured on Oprah it stretched around the world simply because everyone loved it. It flew under the radar for a few years, deployed locally in New York as a “bartender’s choice” cocktail for those in the know, quietly gaining devotees until it reached critical mass. As far as famous cocktails are concerned, I challenge you to find a less appealing name than “Penicillin,” and yet aside from perhaps the Gold Rush (from which this is derived) and the Paper Plane, the Penicillin is the most successful cocktail invented in the current millennium. This is a starting point for the Penicillin from New York bartender Sam Ross. How to Make a Greenpoint, One of the Best Twists on the Manhattan You'll Find How to Make a Pornstar Martini, a Delicious Vodka Cocktail That's for Adults Only How to Make a Gibson, the Gin Martini With a Surprising-and Delicious-Garnish There are obviously compliments as well, Laphroiag lovers, as it were, but among them were other people wrinkling their nose and noting flavors like “iodine” and “formaldehyde” and, “it’s like taking the bathroom door of a dive bar, lighting it on fire, and dragging it through a field of wildflowers,” all of which pointing to the fact that peat-smoked scotch is a weird and wild spirit, and not for everyone. “That first sip was like getting hit in the face with a warm shovel,” one man says, to his family’s amusement, “I didn’t like it at all.” Peat-smoked scotch is notoriously aggressive and medicinal, and these opinions, Laphroaig reminded us, were 100 percent unscripted. What made these unusual is that many of these opinions were, to put it gently, unkind. On their face, the commercials were pretty standard, just regular people sipping the whiskey and offering their opinion of it. ![]() A few years ago, the scotch whiskey company Laphroaig came out with an unusual advertising campaign.
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