Penicillin

Blended Scotch, lemon juice, honey-ginger syrup, and an Islay single malt float — Sam Ross's 2005 Milk & Honey creation, now an IBA Contemporary Classic.

The Penicillin was created by Sam Ross — an Australian-born bartender working in New York City — at Milk & Honey on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side in 2005. Ross had joined Milk & Honey, Sasha Petraske's influential craft cocktail bar that had opened on New Year's Eve 1999, and the Penicillin was among the drinks he developed in the bar's early years. The formula combines blended Scotch whisky with fresh lemon juice, a house-made honey-ginger syrup, and a float of Islay single malt Scotch — the Islay expression's distinctive peat smoke floating on the drink's surface as a concentrated aromatic layer that the drinker encounters on each sip before it integrates into the sweetened citrus and blended Scotch below. The honey-ginger syrup, made from fresh ginger infused into honey-and-water syrup, provides both sweetness and a spiced warmth that complements Scotch's grain character in a way that plain sugar does not. The Penicillin's name references penicillin, the antibiotic discovered by Alexander Fleming in London in 1928, evoking both its claimed restorative properties and the scientific naming tradition common to pre-Prohibition cocktail culture. The IBA included the Penicillin in its Contemporary Classics category. Ross subsequently created the Paper Plane at Milk & Honey, and went on to co-found Attaboy in 2011.