The Most Refreshing Tequila Drinks

The Mexican Firing Squad is one of the few classic tequila cocktails we have and it’s one of the earliest recipes published in the English language that makes use of the agave spirit. It’s incredibly simple, just some pomegranate and baking spices accenting a basic sour-style mix, but it unfolds like a story in four acts, each ingredient playing its role perfectly: You meet the tequila first before the bright juiciness of the pomegranate takes over, which turns tart with lime and then finishes with the dry textured spice of the bitters. It’s elegant, simple, and delightful, a worthy bit of cocktail reporting by an adventurer who couldn’t help but share this deliciousness, and his enthusiasm for it, with the world.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard for six to eight seconds. Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice and garnish with a lime wheel, or if you’re feeling festive and want to do it as Baker suggests, “garnish with a slice of orange, a slice of pineapple, and a red cherry.”

There was a time, not too long ago, when the everyday bar patron viewed mezcal’s flavor as a bit too assertive. Bartenders still found ways to incorporate the smoky agave spirit into drinks by using a little less mezcal and supplementing it with tequila, a method known as “splitting the base.” Lots of cocktails split the base to create new and interesting flavor combinations in a drink. Such was the case with the Cobra Clutch, an agave cocktail with pineapple and lime that combined mezcal and tequila. Although mezcal has been embraced by the drinking public much more since the Cobra Clutch was invented more than a decade ago, this cocktail isn’t improved by getting rid of the tequila in favor of its smokier cousin. In fact, the Cobra Clutch is a shining example of how and when to split the base in your cocktail to achieve a flavor you couldn’t get from just picking one spirit or another.

And all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with crushed ice. Briefly shake to incorporate the ingredients, then pour into a large rocks glass. Top with more crushed ice, and garnish with a mint sprig.

The Toreador cocktail is tequila, apricot liqueur, and lime juice, and is among the first tequila cocktails ever printed in the English language, in William J. Tarling’s Cafe Royal Cocktail Book, in 1937. It’s essentially a Margarita with apricot instead of orange, and it’s justifiably overshadowed by its orangey sister because the apricot speaks a little too loudly in a classic Toreador—the boldness of the fruit too brash on the midpalate. But one of the best bars in the world, Jigger & Pony in Singapore, correctly saw that a little yogurt could solve that problem perfectly. After traveling around the world to try the bar’s White Toreador, we took the bar’s recipe and made a few tweaks for home bartenders.

Adapted from Jigger & Pony, Singapore

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker and shake briefly without ice to whip the egg Add ice and shake hard for 10 to 12 seconds. Strain up into a cocktail glass. No garnish.

In the case of the Infante, that idea is to replace the agave nectar and/or orange liqueur of a Margarita with orgeat, an almond syrup made beautiful with a touch of orange flower water. This seems simple, but it’s a seismic shift; where a Margarita is all bright refreshment, the Infante, named for golden-age singer and actor Pedro Infante, blends that refreshment with a nutty decadence. Tequila is an unusually character-driven spirit and the orgeat folds into that character like a dream, the almond lending body to the spirit’s midpalate, with a breath of the orange flower water on the finish giving a perfumed warmth to the tart lime. It’s a Margarita with more depth and presence, one for cooler nights, a Margarita that brings a jacket to dinner, even though it may not end up needing it.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker and shake on ice for six to eight seconds. Strain over fresh ice into a rocks glass and garnish with shaved fresh nutmeg over a lime wheel, a lime peel or nothing at all. 

The Chi Chi Rodriguez was invented by Cassandra Feather, at the Lion’s Share in San Diego. The impetus for the drink was the torrid love affair between vanilla and passion fruit—passion fruit is a front palate scene-stealer with electric acidity, which is completed by the low and lingering resonant sweetness of vanilla (a combination vividly mapped by the Pornstar Martini). Then Feather started tinkering, using tequila instead of vodka and adding lime, and if she had stopped there, this would be a delicious but forgettable cocktail. But she did two more things to enhance it—first, she dosed it with a couple dashes of habanero tincture, and also, improbably, she spliced in a half ounce of a poblano chile spirit called Ancho Reyes Verde.

The resulting cocktail is viscerally refreshing, juicy, and bright, but also deeply flavored and complex. It’s the kind of drink that people tend to love, sitting in that happy part of the venn diagram that joins “interesting” and “delicious”—it’s there for you at a cocktail bar if you want to think about every sip, but it’s also there for you at Monday happy hour if you just want to to take down a couple spicy Margaritas.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake hard for six to eight seconds. Strain into a rocks glass or up into a cocktail class that’s rimmed with tajin (also optional).

The Siesta is a lovely drink, complex and dynamic, with seams so tight you can’t even find them. It opens like a Margarita, with lime and tequila, transitions in the midpalate to the juicy grapefruit, and finishes with the herbal orange of the Campari amplifying grapefruit’s natural bitterness. Nearly two decades after its creation, bartender Katie Stipe’s cocktail endures as one of the great tequila-based neo-classics, helping usher in a new era of agave-based drinks.

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice and shake good and hard for six to 10 seconds. Strain up into a coupe or cocktail glass, or over fresh ice on the rocks, as you prefer, and garnish with a grapefruit peel or lime wheel.

You don’t expect a cocktail this pretty to be this good. You just don’t. Not to dwell on the superficial, but look at the Aloe Black: It’s sea-foam green or swimming-pool blue, depending on the light, and is the kind of thing you’d clock from the far side of the dining room, and flag down the nearest employee to demand to know what it is. When a cocktail is this bright and unusual, you’d naturally assume that it had to recruit Midori or Alizé or otherwise some species of neon “pucker” to get there—it’s easy to make a blue-green drink if you expand your ingredient pool to include Mountain Dew Baja Blast, but it isn’t necessarily what you’d want to pair with your salmon.

The Aloe Black, however, has none of that. It is a mixture of tequila, lemon, and an aloe liqueur called Chareau, made green refreshing by cucumber juice and purple floral with crème de violette. It’s those latter two that combine to form the inimitable color, as well as its core flavor profile. “We wanted the drink to taste like a spa day,” says bartender Leigh Lacap, the opening bar manager of Campfire, in Carlsbad, Calif. “Both figuratively and literally.” 

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Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker, and shake good and hard for six to eight seconds. Strain over fresh ice into a rocks glass, and garnish with a sprinkle of pink salt and/or a small pink or purple edible flower.

Created by bartender Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin, the Debbie Don’t is an unlikely marriage of reposado tequila, Averna, lemon juice, and maple syrup. The cocktail appears in Regarding Cocktails, the collection of the late Sasha Petraske’s recipes and methods. Petraske is the single most important mixological figure in the last 25 years—he founded the speakeasy Milk & Honey in N.Y.C. in 1999, and in doing so created modern cocktail culture as we know it, as well as seeded a handful of other major cities and a dozen or so bars—and it was under his exacting tutelage that many if not most of the neo-classics cocktails were invented: the Gold Rush, the Penicillin, the Red Hook, I mean, it goes on and on.

The story is that Gelnaw-Rubin was working at one of Petraske’s bars in the early 2010s, Dutch Kills in Queens, and made Petraske a drink he was working on: He started with reposado tequila, for a vegetal agave note sanded down a bit with a light oaky spice, and combined it with the dark coffee-like bitterness of the Sicilian amaro Averna, the bright tartness of lemon juice and the sweet depth of maple syrup, and gave it to Petraske to try. “He surprised me by telling me it was the best drink I’d ever come up with,” recounts Gelnaw-Rubin, with Petraske adding, “if you don’t understand why, that’s OK.”

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice, and give it a long hard shake, 10 to 12 seconds, before straining either up into a coupe or over fresh ice in a rocks glass. Garnish with a lemon peel, a lemon wheel, or nothing at all. 

There’s a bit of a murky origin story to the Cadillac Margarita. It may have been invented at a restaurant with outposts in Mexico and Texas; it could have started been from a restaurant in Cincinnati; or it might have ascended because of an LA restaurant El Torito slinging a ton of Margs throughout Southern California. No matter where it started, the idea of stepping up from a boilerplate triple sec to a nice dry curuçao adds a opulent touch to the drink.

Add ingredients to shaking tin and shake hard for 10 seconds then strain into a rocks glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a lime wedge or wheel.

The El Guapo is an advertisement for innovation. Most of the time, you have a crazy new idea and try it and it’s terrible. Sometimes, though, it ends up like this: Take the same hot sauce you’d use on your burrito and put a bunch of it into the shaker tin with your Margarita, and the result, perhaps surprisingly, is among the most delicious and celebrated spicy cocktails of the last 20 years. This cocktail, created in 2008 by Sam Ross at N.Y.C.’s Little Branch, also throws in some salt and pepper, because why not? Make his original, below, or try out an even more refreshing variation of El Guapo.

Add lime pieces to shaker tin and muddle to get as much juice out as possible. At the rest of the ingredients, shake hard for five to six seconds and dump the whole thing, ice and all, into a large rocks glass. Taste for balance and add more lime juice as necessary. Garnish with a sprinkle of salt and a good crack of black pepper.