A Cinnamon Peach Mezcal Margarita That Is Very, Very Blue

Deconstructing and reconstructing a weird, delicious cocktail.

If you are the sort of person who tries new and unusual cocktail recipes — and if you are a subscriber to this newsletter, I’m going to assume you are that sort of person — then you have probably had the experience of flipping the pages of some recipe book, or scrolling through some online cocktail-recipe collection and thinking, that sure looks interesting, but who in the world has all the ingredients to make it? 

This reaction is inevitable. Even the most expansive home bar will never have all the obscure or strange ingredients that innovative cocktail bars use in their drinks. A well-curated thousand-bottle bar will still, sometimes, not be enough. 

But this doesn’t mean you should skip over the recipe, assuming you will never taste its wonders. Even an annoyingly difficult-to-make cocktail spec can still contain useful ideas. 

In some cases, as we discussed last year, it contains a structure — a set of core ingredient relationships that can be mimicked and altered in order to contain an entirely new drink based on the same underlying ratio.

But in other cases, these sorts of high-difficulty cocktail recipes contain interesting, clever flavor profiles that you might be able to replicate even if you don’t have every weird bottle called for by the original recipe. 

Recipes are obviously great and useful. I publish a lot of them! But sometimes what you should take from a recipe is not the specific drink itself, but the idea of the drink — the set of interlocking flavors it is based on. And then, with a little bit of know-how, you can take that flavor-profile idea and make your own version of it. 

That’s what we’ll do this week, with a cinnamon peach mezcal margarita that just happens to be very, very blue. We’ll start with a base recipe, then deconstruct it into flavor/ingredient components, and then look at different, hopefully somewhat more accessible ways to put those flavors into a cocktail.