Some people add some ginger spice, which helps (take that idea a little farther and you have a Penicillin, one of the best of the new classics). To our great fortune, fixing this problem isn’t difficult, obscure, or expensive. It’s certainly not bad, but for me, that one-note ending bit is what keeps it from greatness. The cocktail starts with bourbon’s oak and lemon tartness and then settles into a wide flat honey note, like a beaver’s tail, that just sits on the tongue all the way through to the finish. It sits fat on the palate through to the finish, so just as honey smooths out the astringent tannins, it also drowns out a lot of what would otherwise make the drink interesting. Honey has a clinginess to its flavor-even if a drink is balanced, honey is the last thing you taste. The weakness of the Gold Rush, however, comes from the very source of its strength, making it a kind of tragic flaw: the honey.
Additionally, the presence of the honey occupies the spot in the finish where the whiskey’s tannins would get astringent, solving a persistent problem with (non-egg white) whiskey sours and solidifying it as one of the simplest and most intuitive of the “new” classics.
It embodies one of the mind-blowingly simple concepts that broadens ideas of what cocktails can be: Sub honey for sugar in a basic whiskey sour, and you’re thrust into a practically new world of flavor and texture. It spread quickly and was everywhere in those heady early years. The Gold Rush feels like it has been around forever but was invented just 20 years ago, at the legendary Milk & Honey in New York City.
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