Chill Out With the Penichillin, a Frozen Scotch Cocktail With Honey and Ginger

When you want a fancy cocktail that's also beach ready.

The use-case for frozen cocktails is extremely straightforward: Sometimes it’s really hot outside, and you want a cocktail that is icy cold. 

In many cases that’s going to mean fairly obvious drinks from the frozen cocktail universe — frozen Margaritas and frozen fruity Daiquiris and so forth. These are the standards in the frozen cocktail canon, and when made with a bit of care and ingenuity they can be exquisite and delicious. 

But sometimes you want a frozen cocktail that is, well, more of a modern sophisticated drink — something that works beachside on a hot day but that you probably wouldn’t be able to order in any form at a Las Vegas pool bar. 

As modern sophisticated cocktails go, few rival the success of the Penicillin. Created by Sam Ross in the mid-00s, it’s a potent, intriguing, and altogether satisfying mix of blended and peaty scotch, plus lemon juice, ginger, and honey. The Penicillin may well be the most successful new cocktail of the last 20 years — and if not, it’s certainly in the running. 

And it turns out that you can convert the Penicillin into an icy frozen delight — which has been dubbed the Penichillin. It’s not just a good drink; it’s a drink with a pun name. Obviously, I’m a fan.

There are a lot of recipes for the Penichillin out there, and they feature a variety of ratios and ice proportions and methods of incorporating ginger into the drink. I’ve tried a bunch of them, and while they’re all gesturing at the right idea, I don’t think most of the easily Google-able specs quite work, in part because they have sweetness and dilution issues, and in part because most of them lack the crucial ingredient from the original Penicillin — fresh ginger juice, extracted straight from the root, then sweetened into a syrup. 

So for this week’s newsletter, we are going to make a Penichillin with fresh ginger juice. 

This does take a little bit of effort. 

However, I’ve been working out of a kitchen away from home for the last several weeks, and I can assure you that it can be made without a huge array of specialized tools — all you really need is a decent blender and a fine mesh strainer. And, I suppose, some measuring devices and a bowl.

I’m going to assume you have a bowl. 

Damn, That’s Some Cold

This drink will also teach you a few things about

• how to adapt cocktails to a frozen/blended format more generally

• and how cocktails evolve over time. 

Before we get to the frozen Penichillin, start with the original, unfrozen Penicillin. The best way to understand this drink is as an evolution of the whiskey sour, two full steps away from the original drink. 

There are a bunch of ways to make a whiskey sour — you can add egg, orange juice, and all sorts of other stuff if you want to spruce it up — but at heart the drink is just whiskey (typically but not always bourbon), lemon juice, and sugar syrup.¹

Long ago, at the beginning of the cocktail renaissance, bartenders at the foundational New York bar Milk and Honey² had the brilliant idea to swap out the sugar syrup for honey syrup. At the time, that sort of swap was still pretty novel in the cocktail world.

This single swap subtly but significantly altered the drink, giving it not only a honeyed flavor, but a thicker texture. It was a new drink, and it got its own name: the Gold Rush. 

Once the Gold Rush had been invented, it only took a little bit more creativity to invent the Penicillin, which makes two major changes to the Gold Rush formula. 

First, it takes the Gold Rush’s base of bourbon whiskey and swaps it for blended scotch, plus a small “float” of extremely peaty Scotch, like Laphroaig 10, misted or drizzled on top. This gives you a mild, drinkable base — but enhances the nose of the drink with something much more aggressive. The effect is similar to twisting an orange peel to release orange oils over an Old Fashioned, framing the approach to the drink with a more distinctive smell while leaving the underlying drink largely the same. 

Second, it swaps out half of the honey syrup portion of the drink for ginger syrup — which is ginger juice extracted from ginger root then sweetened with sugar. 

That gives you the following spec: