A Pair of After-Dinner Mezcal Negroni Variations

Chocolate spice and nutty coffee riffs turn the drink into different forms of digestif.

A brief programming note: I returned to Josh Barro’s excellent podcast this week to talk about fall cocktails. Topics covered include: the versatility of Mezcal Negronis, hot drinks, pumpkin-spice cocktails, sous vide syrups, and why making your own amaro is like watching a group house full of strangers get to know each other. It was a fun, sprawling conversation, and I hope you enjoy it too!

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While we are on the topic of Mezcal Negronis, let’s make two more variations on the theme. 

I can already hear you wondering: It’s no longer Negroni Week. So why are we still talking about Mezcal Negronis?

I’m glad you asked. 

First, they’re perfect for transitional weather. Today is the first day of fall, and the Mezcal Negroni is a drink that reflects the season. Smoky, earthy, herbal, and bittersweet but not quite brooding, they bring to mind fire-pit hangouts and leaves falling in the park. They’re cocktails that work best when the whether is cooling down but isn’t yet cold. Mezcal Negronis are the t-shirt and zip-up hoodie combo of the cocktail world — comfortable, flexible, and effortless. 

This tees up my second reason: They’re incredibly easy to make. Negroni-class drinks of all kinds require just a few off-the-shelf ingredients. There’s no juice, no syrups, no serious prep work aside from purchasing the bottles. Indeed, neither of today’s drinks use any sort of sweet vermouth, so you don’t need to store anything in the fridge. You need ice, a glass, and a bar cart with the right bottles — and that’s it. 

Especially after spending the hot months on fairly elaborate tiki drinks, I wanted to return to drinks that are relatively easy to make. 

That, in turn, brings us to the third reason: Despite their ease and simplicity, drinks in the Mezcal Negroni family deliver fascinatingly rich and complex arcs of flavor; these are some of the most interesting and unusual tasting drinks in the cocktail universe. Yet they aren’t difficult stunt drinks either; they’re balanced and structurally sound. 

In some ways they are poster children for mixing drinks — they show how much you can do just by combining a few well-chosen ingredients. Understood that way, they are good value propositions, delivering a lot of complexity, intrigue, and satisfaction for relatively little work.

Similarly, they also show how much you can do within a single, relatively narrow cocktail format. Last week’s variation, the Scorched Earth, kicked up the heat and bitterness quotient; it comes across as something like a weird, herbal cousin to a spicy Margarita, the kind of thing you’d drink on a warm afternoon. 

This week’s drinks, in contrast, take the format in an after-dinner direction, adding herbal cocoa-spice notes in one case, and coffee and almond notes in the other.

The Mezcal Negroni is already a sub-family of the Negroni line. Yet even still, it contains multitudes. So it’s worth exploring the nooks and crannies of the category a little bit more.