Tequila Cocktails and Where They Come From

The Batanga and the bar that gave tequila its name

Tequila takes its name from a town in Jalisco, which became known in the 19th century for the quality of its agave spirits. Its oldest surviving bar, La Capilla, ‘the Chapel’, is run by the grandson of the original owner, Don Javier Delgado Corona, who invented two of the best tequila cocktails: the Paloma and the Batanga. The Batanga is simply tequila and cola, in a salt-rimmed glass, stirred with a knife and finished with a squeeze of lime. It works because the spice and vegetal side of tequila suits the citrus, nutmeg and cinnamon of cola, and because Mexicans drink more carbonated drinks per head than any other nation, about half a litre per person each day. Stephenson recommends Mexican Coca-Cola, made with cane sugar rather than corn syrup and served in glass bottles; he notes that tests show people mostly prefer the American version, and that the advantage of the Mexican one is in perception and in the glass.

El Diablo: a way into tequila

Most people meet tequila as a shot or as a badly made frozen Margarita, usually with a cheap mixto tequila. If there were a rulebook, the author says, El Diablo would be the drink to start with. It is a long drink of reposado tequila, crème de cassis, lime and ginger ale, close in structure to a Buck or a Moscow Mule, where the blackcurrant picks out the fruit in the tequila and the ginger ale adds length and dryness. It appears to have been invented by Victor Bergeron, Trader Vic, who published it as the Mexican El Diablo in Trader Vic’s Book of Food and Drink (1946).

The Tequila Sunrise before orange juice

The words ‘tequila’ and ‘sunrise’ first met in the 1920s and 1930s at the Agua Caliente resort in Tijuana, a complex of casino, hotel, golf course and racetrack that attracted film stars and Americans in search of a drink during Prohibition. A resort brochure of 1933, Bottoms Up! Y Como!, lists a ‘Sunrise tequila’ of tequila, lime, grenadine, crème de cassis and soda water, closer to an El Diablo than to today’s drink. By the 1960s it had become a grenadine-sweetened tequila sour, and orange juice only entered it in the 1970s. Stephenson’s complaint is that the modern version is sweet and sticky, and that the neat way to fix sweetness is not more acid but more cold: the Tequila Solero freezes the drink into a layered ice lolly.

Flavoured tequila, done honestly

Agave spirits have mostly escaped the flavoured-spirit treatment that vodka, rum and bourbon suffered. The Coca-Quila infuses tequila with the flavours behind the cola taste that are not named on the label: orange, cinnamon, lemon, coriander, nutmeg and neroli oils, here replaced with peels, spices, coffee, sugar, salt and orange flower water. The Lobelia goes in the opposite direction and shows how to make a drink from supermarket ingredients alone, using a blackcurrant and ginger ferment fermented with baker’s yeast in a plastic bottle.

Recipes from this chapter

The tequila chapter’s recipes are collected on this site as drafts until we have permission to publish them, together with the homemade ingredients they use.