Gold Rush

The Gold Rush has inspired a bit of a cocktail gold rush.

Before closing, the New York City bar Milk & Honey was the launching pad for so many modern cocktail classics like the Penicillin, Greenpoint, Red Hook, and the all mighty Gold Rush. One could argue that the Penicillin might actually have the bigger reputation these days, but the Gold Rush is the inspiration behind the honey and whiskey gold rush.

At its core, this cocktail could almost be considered a riff on the classic Whiskey Sour. While the Sour uses bourbon, lemon juice, simple syrup, and bitters, this cocktail takes things just a bit further. Bourbon and lemon juice remain star players, but rich honey syrup elevates the flavor for that signature rush of sweetness. With the classic flavors and name, many people like to think of this drink as a pre-Prohibition era cocktail. However, it’s only been around for about 20 years and still managed to accomplish quite a lot.

Around the same time at Milk & Honey, another bartender was so impressed by the new cocktail that he created a Scotch variation and named it the Penicillin. Years later, a San Francisco bartender named Helen Diaz whipped up the Gold Rusher – a Fernet laced riff on the original. But despite all of the new iterations, the original Gold Rush still stands strong as a new, modern cocktail classic.