Maverick

A fresh, herbaceous gin cocktail with Aperol bitterness and spicy ginger warmth, created at Attaboy Nashville.

The Maverick was created by Mike McCollum at Attaboy Nashville in 2019, working within a bar culture shaped directly by one of the craft cocktail movement's most influential template drinks. Attaboy is the bar founded by Sam Ross — the bartender who created both the Paper Plane and the Penicillin — and the Paper Plane's equal-parts architecture (bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino, fresh lemon juice) has become one of the most widely used creative frameworks in contemporary bartending precisely because equal-parts formulas are structurally self-correcting: each component disciplines the others, preventing any single ingredient from dominating. The Maverick adapts that framework by substituting gin for bourbon, Campari for Amaro Nonino, and adding fresh mint as an aromatic element, while retaining Aperol and citrus. Replacing bourbon's sweetness with gin's botanical dryness, and substituting Campari's clean grapefruit-and-herb bitterness for the heavier amaro, produces a lighter and more aromatic drink than the Paper Plane — what Ross's template produces when filtered through a gin sensibility rather than a whiskey one. The drink's name fits the creative posture: working from an established structure while deliberately departing from it.