The Spicy Margarita, 4 Ways
Many methods for adding spicy, peppery, heat to your end-of-summer marg.
On occasion, I have encountered articles or message board comments claiming that the spicy Margarita is the drink of the summer, or the drink of the moment.
I don’t know about any of that. Cocktail trends come and go so fast these days. Maybe it’s the drink of the zeptosecond?
Yes, some bar surveys do attempt to rank the popularity of certain cocktails. But it’s not like there are Billboard top 40 charts cocktails. You can’t look at box office totals for cocktails sold every weekend.
And as far as I’m concerned, the real drink of the moment is whatever you happen to have in your hand.
But it’s safe to say that the spicy Margarita is very, very trendy. You’ll find spicy Margs of varying quality on cocktail menus everywhere these days, often under assumed names.
Indeed, I’ve received several requests for a recipe, so I wanted to make sure we get to it before the summer’s end — especially since it’s such a perfect dog-days-of-August, end-of-the-summer-season drink.
But instead of one spicy Margarita recipe, we’ll go a good bit further and look at four.
Each recipe uses a different method/ingredient for adding heat to the core Margarita formula, and each method has pluses and minuses for home bartenders.
As always with this newsletter, you can always just make the recipe. All four methods all make delicious spicy Margaritas — although there is one that I think is pretty clearly the best.
But you can also look at this as an overview of different ways to modify classic cocktail structures by adding specific, novel flavors.
A spicy Margarita is a tasty, trendy drink. But making one — or four — is also a lesson in cocktail building.
Trying to Win the, uh, Marg-ument
Before we get to the spicy Margarita, let’s briefly go back over the original drink.
The core elements of a Margarita are tequila, lime juice, and orange liqueur, typically Cointreau. Like the Daiquiri, it’s a shaken, sour-type drink composed of strong (tequila), sour (lime), and sweet (orange liqueur) elements.
Most contemporary recipes add in a small portion of syrup — typically agave syrup, although some use honey syrup or simple syrup — to give the drink a bit more body and sweetness. (This is optional, but even for those who prefer dryer drinks, I would note that contest-winning recipes almost always have some sort of added syrup.)
A Tommy’s Margarita is a popular variation that completely replaces the orange liqueur with agave syrup.
Most Margaritas include salt of some kind. Many bars and recipes call for a salted rim; I strongly prefer salt integrated into the drink through a homemade saline solution.
You can combine these ingredients into something Margarita-like in a variety of different ways.
When I initially covered Margaritas in this newsletter several years ago, I wrote about three different recipes:
the classic on the rocks
the Tommy’s with no orange liqueur
and a Mezcal-based variation.
You can transform any of these into a spicy Margarita. But for today’s purposes, all recipes will be based around the classic format.
The question, then, is how to add a bit of peppery, lively, what’s-that-burning-sensation?-heat to the core template.
Gang of Four
The four methods we will look at are:
Chile pepper liqueur
Store-bought bitters/shrub
Homemade tincture/infusion
Sliced jalapeno peppers shaken into the mix
Let’s start with the very first method I learned for making a spicy Margarita, and one of the easiest — using chile pepper liqueur.