Stay Cool With This Three-Ingredient Frozen Bourbon Cocktail

If you can convert your Penicillin into a frozen, blended drink, you can convert your Gold Rush into a slushy-style cocktail too.

In last week’s newsletter, we looked at the Penichillin — an irresistably complex and delicious frozen/blended cocktail with two types of scotch, lemon, honey, and fresh-pressed ginger juice. 

The Penichillin, of course, is a frozen adaptation of the wildly popular shaken drink, the Penicillin.

And the Penicillin is just an iterated whiskey sour. Indeed, you can think of it like a further-evolved version of the Gold Rush, a related whiskey sour variation that swaps honey syrup for sugar syrup in a basic whiskey sour template. 

So it stands to reason that if you can make a Penichillin — a frozen Penicillin — then you ought to be able to make a frozen Gold Rush as well. 

Structurally, it’s quite similar to the Penichillin. The trick, basically, is just to use bourbon instead of scotch, and to use honey syrup exclusively instead of the Penichillin’s combo of honey and ginger syrup.

With just three ingredients — bourbon, honey syrup, and lemon — and no need to press fresh ginger, it’s considerably simpler to make than its ginger-and-scotch counterpart. 

And you end up with what amounts to honey-bourbon slushy. It’s not quite as complex as the Penichillin, but it’s rich, icy, and supremely tasty. This drink’s biggest problem might be that it’s just too easy to drink.

You can use most any decent bourbon here, but I like something that’s both a little higher proof and not too fancy, like Evan Williams Bottled-in-Bond/White Label. But don’t fret over the choice; your house bourbon should work well.

Frozen/blended drinks like this are especially welcome on a hot summer day. Which makes this drink both timely and relevant, since it looks like large swaths of the United States are going to be hit with a gnarly heat wave over the next week or so. 

Stay cool, folks. Drink frozen cocktails.

If a frozen Penicillin gets branded as a Penichillin, then I suppose we’ll probably have to call a frozen Gold Rush…a Cold Rush.¹ 

Cold Rush

• 7 1.25 inch Tovolo ice cubes, or about 175 grams of ice 

• 1 ¼ ounce 3:1 honey syrup*

• Fat ¾ ounce fresh lemon juice (just a tad more than ¾ ounce — but not quite a full ounce)

• 2 ounces bourbon, preferably Evan Williams Bottled-In-Bond/White Label 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender.

2. Blend until smooth, about 10-20 seconds. 

3. Pour contents into a short glass. Drink through a straw.

*3:1 honey syrup: Combine three parts honey with one part water, by volume. Whisk together until fully integrated. Bottle and store in the fridge. Keeps for at least a month.

A Large Dog Who Also Loves Whiskey in the Summer

1. I made this drink because it’s a really tasty drink. But never underestimate the appeal of a solid pun name.