“There’s no different spirit like mezcal,” declares Carlo Bracci, beverage director of Tahona Bar, in San Diego’s Previous City neighborhood.
With a mission to teach concerning the agave spirit whereas offering first-rate cocktails, Bracci homed in on a crowd-pleasing traditional: the Mexican Firing Squad, a combination of tequila, lime juice, grenadine and Angostura bitters pulled from the pages of Charles H. Baker’s Gentleman’s Companion, Quantity II from 1946. Unsurprisingly, Bracci’s first replace was to swap out tequila for mezcal and alter the title to the Oaxacan Firing Squad, “to make it fairly apparent that it’s made with mezcal fairly than tequila.”
However that was simply the start line for tweaking the agave traditional.
Switching the bottom spirit to mezcal made it straightforward to place the tart, citrusy drink as a mezcal Margarita: “You may get a good suggestion of the flavour,” based mostly on that description, he explains. The Oaxacan Firing Squad shortly turned one of many bar’s bestsellers.
Bracci’s mezcal of selection for the drink is Amarás Verde, a “balanced, evenly smoky” choice that’s additionally one of many bottles within the properly. “Solely espadíns needs to be utilized in cocktails,” he cautions, referring to the commonest agave selection used to make the spirit, which is cultivated extensively and matures extra shortly than wild agaves. His reasoning is predicated totally on sustainability. “It’s not value it to waste one thing [by mixing it] that took 14 to 25 years to develop,” he says.
From there, Bracci switched out the everyday Angostura bitters for mole bitters, which provides a refined chocolate spice observe. And that’s the place issues began to get attention-grabbing.
“We thought we’d use mole bitters and name it a day,” he remembers. However Tahona can also be a restaurant centered on Oaxacan meals with Baja inspiration—together with a dish that includes a trio of moles (negro, coloradito and pipián), and the restaurant’s mole negro, specifically, turned a key part of a do-it-yourself mole grenadine. To make it, what begins as a traditional pomegranate-and-sugar grenadine is infused with the mole—a four-year-old solera of a sauce, made with “over 50 totally different components that it has collected over the course of its life,” notably chocolate, three forms of chile peppers, plantain, tomato, “tortilla ashes,” and spices together with clove, star anise, cinnamon and allspice.
“Inside our mole there’s a whole lot of fats, a whole lot of lard,” Bracci notes. “We infuse it, we pressure out the large bits, and refrigerate it for a few hours,” earlier than scooping off the chilled fat that accumulate on high. To be clear, it’s not fat-washing, he cautions. As an alternative, he describes the method as “chill filtration,” the identical method used to take away chemical compounds that may create a cloudy look in spirits.
The Oaxacan Firing Squad requires extra mole grenadine than the traditional—one ounce, versus three-quarters of an oz.—partly to stability the comparatively excessive proof of the mezcal, and partly to make the flavour extra approachable.
The remaining elements come collectively across the mole grenadine: An oz. of lime—once more, barely greater than the ratio of the traditional—balances the sweetness of the grenadine, whereas mole bitters amplify the sweetener’s chocolate notes. For the completion, a flag of skewered dehydrated lime and cherry “makes it extra fancy.”
Bracci views the Oaxacan Firing Squad as one of many many “dialog starters” on the menu—a roster of classics with not-always-subtle tweaks meant to make drinks extra approachable or attention-grabbing in a roundabout way, starting from a Diablo variation enlivened with a blue butterfly pea float, to a Batanga made with housemade cola syrup. “We love to do enjoyable stuff like this. We wish to stimulate dialog,” Bracci explains, all in service of additional educating visitors about mezcal.
And a playful, memorable drink riff that may additionally encourage visitors to be taught extra about mezcal? “It was a match made in heaven.”
