A Fall-Friendly, Apple Brandy Riff on the Penicillin

Plus! A story about ordering off-menu cocktails.

Over the last month, we’ve looked at:

• Whiskey Sours¹ (‘tis the season) and a particularly excellent twist on the drink

• How apple brandy works as a great partnering ingredient in split-base cocktails 

• A complex Scotch whisky Old Fashioned variation with a smoky, peaty accent 

• Ordering off-menu drinks at cocktail bars, especially those that don’t have menus at all

This week, I want to combine all three ideas into a single story and a single drink.

This is a story about ordering drinks off menu, and specifically figuring out how to quickly, efficiently, and precisely describe the sort of drink you want to a bartender. And it’s a story that results in one of my favorite clever drink variations — an apple brandy-forward riff on the Penicillin (a honey-ginger Scotch whisky sour) that I’ve never seen published anywhere. 

Like the original Penicillin itself, making this cocktail takes a little bit of effort. You’ll need to make both ginger syrup and honey syrup. You’ll need bottles of apple brandy and Scotch whisky. And it helps if you have a small mist/spray bottle on hand too.

But the result — a fall-friendly, smoky-apple, honey-ginger sour topped with a delicate layer of warming bitter spice — is very much worth the work. And it’ll teach you a few things about cocktail construction, too.

What Can I Get You? 

The very first time a cocktail bartender asked me what kind of drink I liked, I nearly froze up. This would have been around 2010 or 2011, on my second visit to the Columbia Room, when I knew almost nothing about the world of classic cocktails. I don’t think I could have described for you the difference between a shaken drink and a stirred one. I knew…I liked…whiskey…? I guess? But I couldn’t even come up with that. Instead, I recalled the one cocktail that impressed me most the previous time I’d been. It was some sort of eggy sour, and I’d never had a drink with egg in it.

 So I just said: I want a drink with egg in it. I got a drink with egg in it. A decade or more later, I can’t tell you what it was, but I do recall that it was pretty good. Fluffy! Eggy! Fun. Everyone loves an egg. There’s probably a Humpty Dumpty joke here somewhere? Anyway, it was, uh, eggs-cellent.

Flash forward a few years to the mid 00s, and I was much more comfortable ordering off menu, especially at bars that explicitly advertised the option, either by not having a menu at all or by listing “bartender’s choice” or “dealer’s choice” on the menu.² 

The question, then, is how to describe your preferences to a bartender.

I have sat at bars and listened to nearby guests delivering their requests in the form of discursive monologues. Folks, I obviously — obviously! — have nothing against long-windedness on the topic of cocktails. But a drink order should not be an exercise in off-the-cuff epic poetry.

A drink order should be clear, in that it presents some straightforward parameters to the bartender and also maximizes the sort of cocktail you hope to drink. And it should be relatively succinct. A bartender’s time is limited — and at a certain point they’re just zeroing in on keywords anyway. 

What sort of words will they focus on? Specific spirits, for one, especially base spirits like whiskey or rum or gin, and specific techniques, like shaken or stirred. Also drink categories or families, like Negroni or highball, and flavor characteristics like herbal, smoky, or bitter. 

You can turn this into a game with props like Dealer’s Choice Dice. Or you can get a detailed sense of what words bartenders will focus on by looking at the always-excellent Bartender’s Choice app.

The app, which I know is used in some bars, acts as a sort of guide, allowing you to input up to four different preferences that include type of spirit, flavor and texture, technique and category, and modifying ingredients. So if you tell the app you want a “Gin” “Creamy” “Shaken” “Floral” cocktail, you get a bunch of cocktail options with gin and egg or some other cream element. 

The ideal off-menu drink order works about the same way. It’s a few keywords focused on ingredients and style. 

I also think it’s useful to have one additional word that does not specify ingredients or techniques, but instead attempts to identify a cocktail’s…vibe. This is a little more nebulous, but cocktails all have characters or sensibilities. If you have a clear preference on that front, you can describe that in your order. 

This is more or less how a friend and longtime cocktail-bar companion of mine came upon a successful regular off-menu order: “Smoky, artsy, autumnal sour.” 

• Sour is fairly obvious; you’ll get a shaken drink with citrus.

• Autumnal is part vibe, part flavor pointer, since there are certain flavors (apple, nuts, maple syrup, honey, ginger) we tend to associate with fall.

• Smoky indicates flavor but also ingredients — it usually means mezcal or Scotch will be involved, although there are smoky whiskeys, like Wild Turkey’s Longbranch, too.

• And artsy, well, sure, it’s a little pretentious, but it efficiently captures the desired character and sensibility.

It’s succinct. It’s relatively straightforward. And it gives a bartender both clear instructions and some room to experiment. 

A Smoky, Artsy, Autumnal, Sour in Recipe Form

This order produced a lot of good drinks. But the very best one came from Attaboy in Nashville.