Cocktail · Medium strength

Gold Rush

Bourbon, lemon, honey — three ingredients panning for gold and finding it.

How to order it: Honey syrup (3:1), not raw honey. Born at Milk & Honey, NYC, 2001.

The story

A twenty-first-century classic from the bar that minted them. Around the turn of the 2000s at Milk & Honey, Sasha Petraske's reservations-only temple on Manhattan's Lower East Side, T.J. Siegal reworked the whiskey sour with bourbon and rich honey syrup — three ingredients, no garnish drama, served over one large rock. The honey does what sugar can't, rounding the lemon and amplifying everything barrel-aged in the bourbon. The same bar's honey-ginger experiments would soon produce the Penicillin, making the Gold Rush something like the founding document of a dynasty. It endures because it tastes inevitable — the kind of drink that seems a century old the first time you try it.

Classic variation

The Gold Rush is a riff on a classic. Meet the original:

Adjacent pours