Getting Twisted with Jordan Hughes

Featured Cocktail: Modern Medicine

This episode’s featured cocktail is an original cocktail from Twist called Modern Medicine. To make it, you’ll need:

• 1½ oz (45 ml) bourbon
• ½ oz (15 ml) Aperol
• ¾ oz (22 ml) fresh lemon juice
• ½ oz (15 ml) Demerara Syrup
• 2 dashes of aromatic bitters
• ¼ oz (8 ml) smoky scotch

Combine all ingredients EXCEPT the Scotch in a cocktail shaker with ice, give em a good, hard shake, then strain into a rocks glass over ice. Next, you’ll want to gently pour that float of smoky scotch over the back of a bar spoon so that it sits right on top of the drink, garnish with a nice expressed lemon twist, and enjoy.

We’re featuring the Modern Medicine because it’s a lovely example of what Twist is all about. As Jordan explains in the book, it’s a riff on a Penicillin, which is a modern classic cocktail invented at Milk & Honey in New York about 20 years ago. But where the Penicillin leans heavily into the spicy flavor of ginger to complement notes of honey and lemon, the Modern Medicine opts for lightly bitter and brilliantly red Aperol and a couple dashes of bitters for good measure. 

One place where both drinks agree, however, is the crucial importance of that float of smoky scotch, which is the first thing your senses will perceive, mingled with the lemon oil from the garnish, before you plunge into a completely different flavor experience underneath.

When it first came out, and in the two decades since, the Penicillin has been an incredibly popular cocktail, and it’s definitely lauded for its extremely deft flavor artistry. But with the Modern Medicine, Jordan takes us behind the scenes and demonstrates that anyone can invent a similarly delicious cocktail by just tweaking a few key flavor variables juuust a little bit.