Margarita
The Margarita is the most ordered cocktail in the United States, and that status has done to it what it did to the Mojito: margarita mix, bottled lime and the frozen resort serve have created a whole category of drink that carries the name without the substance. Made properly it is three ingredients: blanco tequila, fresh lime juice and orange liqueur, shaken cold with a salt rim. That is a sour at its most direct, and in a build this bare the quality of everything is immediately apparent. There is nowhere to hide a neutral tequila, a bottled lime or a cheap triple sec. The choice that matters most is not up versus rocks, which is a matter of preference. It is blanco versus reposado. Blanco is cleaner and more agave-forward and the lime meets the tequila directly; reposado is rounder, its oak putting vanilla and caramel against the lime in a different register. Both are correct, and blanco is the more coherent with fresh lime.
Variations
Glassware: Coupe Glass
Garnish: Lime Wheel and Salt Rim
Ingredients
50ml
A quality blanco with genuine agave character. The tequila defines the drink, and a neutral or characterless bottle produces a flat result regardless of how well everything else is handled.
15ml
Squeezed immediately before use, and the single most consequential variable at fifteen millilitres, because there is not enough of it to hide a dull one. Bottled lime or juice that has oxidised produces a flat drink no quality tequila can compensate for.
20ml
Cointreau is the benchmark; Pierre Ferrand Dry Curaçao is drier and more complex if you want that. A cheap triple sec makes the whole drink taste synthetic, and there is nothing here to hide it behind.
Instructions
Squeeze the lime juice immediately before building the drink.
Run a spent lime half around half the circumference of the glass and roll that half in flaky sea salt.
Chill the glass if serving straight up.
Add the blanco tequila, lime juice and orange liqueur to a shaker with cubed ice.
Shake hard for 12 to 15 seconds.
Double strain into the chilled coupe, or strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass.
Rest a lime wheel on the rim and serve immediately.
Source: the IBA (Official IBA specification; method ours). Last checked 13 August 2026.
Expert Tip
Fifteen millilitres of lime is less than most sours take and it is deliberate. The official build is a tequila drink first: the agave leads, the orange liqueur rounds it, and the lime sharpens both without turning the glass into a sour. A heavier hand with the lime produces something tarter and thinner, which is a fine drink and a different one. Half-rim the salt. A full rim commits every mouthful; a half preserves the contrast, and a sip from each side of the glass demonstrates what the salt is doing better than any explanation can. Taste before serving. Limes vary by season and origin, and this drink has nothing in it to cover for a batch that is unusually sharp or unusually mild.
Behind the Margarita
Flavour Profile
The Disputed Origin
The Margarita's origin is among the most contested in the canon, and the honest position is that nobody knows.
The competing claims include Carlos "Danny" Herrera at Rancho La Gloria near Tijuana in 1938, mixing for a showgirl who was allergic to every spirit except tequila; the socialite Margarita Sames at her Acapulco holiday home in 1948; and Santos Cruz in Mexico City in 1945. None is supported by documentary evidence sufficient to settle anything.
What the record does confirm is the drink appearing in Esquire's cocktail guide in 1953 as a recognised recipe rather than a novelty, which suggests it was already established. It then spread through American bar culture alongside the growth of the Mexican restaurant industry until it became the country's most ordered cocktail.
The Tequila Foundation
No single recipe did more to introduce tequila to the international cocktail market, and the drink is built around what makes the spirit distinct.
Blanco tequila's character is genuinely unlike any other base spirit: vegetal, slightly earthy, with an agave sweetness specific to the plant rather than derived from grain or grape.
The Margarita is constructed around that. The lime cuts through the agave's sweetness without competing with it, and the orange liqueur bridges the two without introducing a third strong flavour. The result tastes specifically of agave and citrus rather than of a generic sour that happens to contain tequila, which is a harder thing to achieve than it sounds.
Why the Lime Measure Is Restrained
Fifteen millilitres against fifty of tequila is a restrained citrus measure, and the reason is the orange liqueur.
Twenty millilitres of a dry triple sec carries both sweetness and its own citrus, so the lime is not working alone: it is sharpening a drink that already has orange in it rather than supplying all the acid itself. Push the lime up and the agave starts to disappear behind the sourness, which is the most common way a Margarita made from a good bottle still tastes ordinary. The measures are tight in both directions, which is why this drink rewards a jigger and punishes a free pour.
The Salt Rim
The salt is doing the same job it does in a Paloma. Sodium suppresses the palate's bitter receptors, which here softens the lime rather than grapefruit and lets the agave lead.
The half-rim matters more than the salt itself. A full rim forces every sip through it, which removes a choice the drinker should have; a half-rim preserves the contrast, and tasting from each side of the glass demonstrates the salt's structural role better than any explanation.
Flaky sea salt rather than table salt, and run the spent lime around the outside of the rim only so that none of it falls into the drink.
Batching and Serving
The Margarita scales linearly without adjustment, which not every drink does. For ten, combine six hundred millilitres of blanco, three hundred of fresh lime and two hundred and twenty of orange liqueur, refrigerate, and shake individual portions over ice to order rather than batching over ice.
Squeeze as close to service as you can and use the batch within about two hours. Lime degrades quickly and a batch will show it.
Shaken hard and double strained into a half-salted coupe, or over fresh ice in a half-salted rocks glass, with a lime wheel. The coupe presents the tequila and lime at their most concentrated; the rocks serve is longer and cooler and suits the outdoors.
Make it at home
The Spirit
TequilaRead the label before the price. Tequila only has to be 51% agave sugars, and no bottle is ever labelled mixto, so the words 100% agave are the only thing separating a spirit made from the plant from one made half from cane or corn.
Master the Techniques
More to explore
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Margarita?
Blanco or reposado?
Why a half salt rim rather than a full one?
Why is there so much lime juice?
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Paloma
The Paloma is Mexico’s most popular cocktail by volume, considerably outselling the Margarita in the country that produces the tequila both are built on. Outside Mexico its profile is lower, partly because the defining grapefruit soda is less universally available than lime and triple sec. The name means dove, and the origin is most often attributed to Don Javier Delgado Corona of La Capilla in the town of Tequila, Jalisco, though the precise date and the accuracy of that attribution are not clearly established anywhere. What is established is that tequila and grapefruit have been a fixture of Mexican drinking long enough to become the country’s default tequila serve, which is a more meaningful endorsement than any bar guide. The salt rim is the element most often omitted by versions that miss what the drink is doing. Salt suppresses bitterness, which makes it a structural decision rather than a flavouring one.
Daiquiri
The Daiquiri is a sour in its most elemental form: white rum, fresh lime juice and sugar syrup, shaken and served up. Three ingredients, no bitters, no liqueur, nothing to hide behind. It takes its name from a mining district on the south-eastern coast of Cuba, near Santiago, where Jennings Cox, an American mining engineer, is credited with combining local white rum with lime and sugar around 1898. Whether Cox invented it or documented what Cuban workers had been drinking for years is not something the record can resolve. What is not disputed is that it was refined and popularised in Havana at El Floridita by Constantino Ribalaigua Vert. The simplicity is the point and the problem at once. There is nothing in the construction to compensate for a poor rum, juice that was not squeezed fresh, or a syrup made carelessly. Every variable is fully exposed, which is why a properly balanced Daiquiri demonstrates more skill than a ten-ingredient tiki drink.
Sidecar
The Sidecar is one of the great drinks of the years after the First World War, and its paternity has never been settled. It appears in 1922 in both Harry MacElhone’s ABC of Mixing Cocktails and Robert Vermeire’s Cocktails: How to Mix Them, with each author crediting someone else: MacElhone named Pat MacGarry at Buck’s Club in London, while Vermeire named MacElhone himself at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris. The dispute is unlikely ever to be resolved. The structure is a sour built on cognac, with Cointreau as the sweetening modifier and fresh lemon as the acid. The cognac brings dried fruit and oak warmth, the Cointreau brings clean orange and the sweetness that answers the lemon, and the lemon keeps the whole thing from turning heavy. It is also among the most ratio-sensitive drinks in the classical canon, which is the argument against the sugar rim some versions carry: the balance here is calibrated without one.
Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits