Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The Dry Margarita!

Written after 12 hours at work behind the bar and three shots of Fernet-Branca. Be gentle.

Not going to lie, the dehydrated lime is a joke on the whole “dry margarita” thing.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. And I’ve just come off a double shift with a deadline approaching for this article, so bear with me if we ramble a bit. I’m working on rum, three shots of Fernet, and spite. Fortunately for all of us, I’ve been thinking about this cocktail for a while. Let’s make a Dry Margarita. Here’s the recipe:

Dry Margarita

1 ½ oz Milagro Blanco tequila

1 oz fresh lime juice

1 oz dry curacao

¾ oz honey syrup

¼ oz Del Maguey Clásico mezcal

Pinch smoked sea salt

Shake all ingredients and strain into an iced rocks glass. Garnish with a dehydrated lime.

It’s summer. It’s margarita season. But honestly, when isn’t it margarita season? Margaritas are delicious, easy to make, and incredibly flexible. A margarita, at its core, is tequila, orange liqueur, and lime. That’s tasty on its own, but there’s space in the recipe for more sugar. Tweak the amount of lime juice — or just commit to making a sweet margarita — and you can add all sorts of flavors. Agave syrup is the standard add-in. I prefer honey syrup. But dive bars will go nuts with that extra space. Any sugary fruit-flavored glop can go into that basic margarita recipe, and something pretty drinkable will come out. The Mexican joints here in town have a dozen margaritas on the menu, and they’re all margarita and syrup concoctions. Passion fruit margaritas, blood orange margaritas ... It’s all just different frostings on the same layer cake.

We don’t have a solid margarita on the menu at Hemingway’s right now. I wanted to add a margarita for summer, but I didn’t want to fall into the same “marg and a fruit” trap. Instead, I decided to push the limits of the core recipe and see if I could make a tart, dry margarita that was still recognizable. I started by boosting the lime juice in our drink to a full ounce. Then, I replaced the triple sec in a standard margarita with dry curacao. Triple sec is made with a neutral spirit and a ton of orange flavor. The dirt-cheap triple sec used by the taco joints in town tastes like Orange Crush. Curacao uses brandy as its base. Dry curacao has less sugar than triple sec by a country mile. Everything I thought I knew about balancing a margarita went out the window. Life was good.

Smoky, acrid mezcal made our margarita even drier. Some extra sugar was needed to make the cocktail drinkable. Agave syrup was an easy answer, but I’m really fond of honey in my tequila drinks. Agave syrup and tequila are kissing cousins, but honey and tequila complement each other. Tequila also loves salt. A pinch of smoked Malbon leaned into the mezcal’s smokiness while enhancing the drink’s flavor. The result is a unique margarita that defies convention, tasting unique without leaning on sticky-sweet fruit syrup.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Ingredient shot. I know, the pictures of bottles with tape on them are inspiring. If and when I get a day off, I’ll put together something sexier.

Milagro Blanco Tequila: Milagro is our rail blanco tequila at Hemingway’s. It’s fairly mild as blanco tequilas go. I prefer a big hit of agave flavor at my home bar; El Jimador is still my cheap blanco of choice. Use what you like best. Bear in mind that a subtle, layered blanco tequila is going to get swamped by the other flavors in this drink. Patron might not be the best choice here.

Lime Juice: Fresh. No exceptions. Especially not in this drink. Limes are small and dry this season, but do your best.

Ferrand Dry Curacao: This orange liquor uses the bare minimum of sugar; it’s not dry, exactly, but it is far less sugary than triple sec. It’s really interesting to use this as a substitute for a sugary liquor and see what happens to the balance of a cocktail. I put a lot of thought into the balance of tart, sweet, and bitter when working behind the stick. Challenging my core assumptions about what works in a “normal” drink like the margarita is a lot of fun.

Honey syrup: 1 part honey, 1 part water, heated until the honey dissolves. Undiluted honey is too thick to use in a cocktail. It’s hard to portion and turns into taffy when it hits ice.

Del Maguey Clásico mezcal: Del Maguey is a balanced, earthy mezcal that doesn’t taste too strongly of smoke or iodine. It’s the rail mezcal for summer at the bar. I like something a little rougher, like Peloton de la Muerte, for the home bar. Taste some options and find what you love. Mezcal is much less consistent in flavor than blanco tequila. Finding a good one will be a bit of a project, but it’s nice to have a hobby over the summer.

Smoked sea salt: Use plain sea salt if you can’t get a smoked salt you like. We use Malbon sea salt at the bar because we’re snobs, and it dissolves easily in cocktails.

I’m in shock, folks. You helped raise $1,000 for my trip to Tales of the Cocktail next month. In addition to a generous contribution by Yr Editrix, I’m fully covered for the trip. Thank you. I’m humbled. I’m also thinking very hard about where my journey as an author will go next. Needless to say, there will be stories to share. And they will be epic. You deserve no less.

My home bar is Hemingway’s Underground, the hottest cocktail bar in pretty little Medina, Ohio. I’m behind the stick Wednesday - Saturday, 4 -10. Last call’s at midnight. Swing on by, and I’ll make a drink for you … or anything else from our little Happy Hour here at Wonkette. We’ll make it through this together.

OPEN THREAD!