Mexican Firing Squad

Wayfinder

The Mexican Firing Squad is tequila, lime, grenadine and Angostura, which is a margarita's shape with two of its four parts swapped out. Charles H. Baker found it at La Cucaracha Bar in Mexico City in the 1930s and filed it in The Gentleman's Companion with his customary gunpowder prose. What makes it worth knowing is that it argues an alternative history. In the 1930s the tequila sour was still an open question, and this is one of the drafts that lost: pomegranate where orange liqueur would eventually rule, Angostura seasoning where salt would settle. The result runs darker, spicier and less bright than the citrus line that won, and a good deal more interesting than the vote suggests. Real grenadine is constitutional. Fifteen millilitres of it is the drink's entire sweet register, and the neon bottle turns it from a dispatch into an execution, which is a joke Baker would have enjoyed.

ShakenClassic

Glassware: Rocks Glass

Garnish: Lime Wheel

Ingredients

Serves

Blanco Tequila

50ml

Peppery blanco, and the pepper is the point. Reposado's oak softens exactly the quality the Angostura is there to pick up, which makes it a rounder and less interesting drink.

Fresh Lime Juice

25ml

A full sour measure, squeezed to order. Twenty-five millilitres against fifty of tequila is margarita proportion, and the frame the whole thing hangs on.

Grenadine

15ml

The entire sweet register, and it has to be real pomegranate. Fifteen millilitres of commercial red syrup gives you sugar and colouring with nothing to meet the lime.

Angostura Bitters

2 dashes

Two dashes seasoning agave, which is an unusual pairing and a good one. Blanco is peppery already, so a heavier hand stacks spice on spice rather than adding depth.

Instructions

Add the tequila, lime juice, grenadine and bitters to a shaker.

Fill with cubed ice and shake hard for 12 seconds.

Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice.

Garnish with a lime wheel.

Expert Tip

Real pomegranate grenadine or do not bother. This is a four-ingredient drink with fifteen millilitres of grenadine as its only sweetening, and the commercial red syrup is sugar and colouring with no fruit character to meet the lime. Equal weights of pomegranate juice and sugar, warmed just enough to dissolve, takes five minutes and keeps a fortnight. Two dashes of Angostura and no more. The bitters are seasoning agave, which is an unusual pairing and a good one, but blanco tequila is peppery already and a heavier hand stacks spice on spice. Blanco rather than reposado. Oak softens the pepper the bitters are there to pick up.

Flavour Profile

AgavePomegranateLimeSpiceDark

Where It Comes From

Charles H. Baker Jr was a travel writer who spent the 1920s and 30s drinking his way around the world and writing it up, and The Gentleman's Companion, published in 1939, is the result. It is one of the great cocktail books and one of the most floridly written, and its value is that Baker recorded what he was actually served rather than what a bar manual said should exist.

He found this at La Cucaracha Bar in Mexico City in the 1930s and printed it with his usual prose about gunpowder and consequences. Whether the name is his or the bar's is not recorded, and it suits both.

The revival's Baker readers pulled it back into service, and it has stayed there.

The Road Not Taken

In the 1930s the tequila sour was an open question. The margarita as we know it had not settled, its own origin is contested and undated, and there were competing drafts for what a tequila-and-lime drink should be.

This is one of them. Take the frame everybody agreed on, which is tequila and a full measure of lime, and answer the sweetening question differently: pomegranate instead of orange liqueur, and aromatic bitters instead of a salt rim.

The result is genuinely different. It runs darker, spicier and less bright, and it drinks earlier in the evening than a margarita does. History picked the orange, and it is worth tasting the two together to see that the vote was closer than the outcome suggests.

Why the Grenadine Decides It

Fifteen millilitres in a four-ingredient drink is the entire sweet register, and there is nothing else in the glass doing that job.

Real grenadine is pomegranate syrup: tart, slightly astringent, and carrying genuine fruit character alongside the sugar. Against lime it meets rather than covers, and against tequila's raw agave it supplies a dark fruit note nothing else in the recipe could.

The commercial red syrup is corn syrup, citric acid and colouring. In this drink it contributes sugar and a colour and nothing else, and what you get is sweetened tequila and lime that happens to be pink.

Making it is trivial: equal weights of pomegranate juice and sugar, warmed only enough to dissolve.

Angostura on Agave

Aromatic bitters in a tequila drink is not a common move, and it is worth understanding why it works here.

Blanco tequila is peppery and vegetal, with a raw agave sweetness. Angostura is clove, cinnamon and gentian. Those are not obviously compatible, and in most tequila drinks they are not.

What makes it work is the grenadine. The pomegranate's dark fruit sits between the agave and the spice and connects them, so the bitters read as an extension of the fruit rather than as something imposed on the spirit. Take the grenadine out and swap in sugar syrup, and the Angostura suddenly sounds foreign.

How to Serve It

Shaken hard for twelve seconds, strained over fresh ice in a rocks glass, lime wheel.

It drinks earlier and darker than a margarita and suits the same table. Making the two side by side replays a 1930s argument in about four minutes, which is a good use of two glasses.

The Spirit

Tequila

Read 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.

Learn more

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Mexican Firing Squad?

Tequila, fresh lime, real grenadine and two dashes of Angostura, shaken and served over ice. Charles H. Baker found it at La Cucaracha Bar in Mexico City in the 1930s and printed it in The Gentleman's Companion.

How does it differ from a margarita?

The sweetener and the seasoning. Grenadine and bitters where a margarita uses orange liqueur and a salt rim, which runs the drink darker and spicier. The tequila and lime frame is identical; everything above it changes.

Why does the grenadine matter so much?

Because it is the drink's entire sweet register. Real pomegranate is tart and carries fruit character that meets the lime; the commercial red syrup is sugar and colouring, and there is nothing here to hide that behind.

Blanco or reposado?

Blanco. Its pepper is what the Angostura is there to pick up, and reposado's oak softens exactly that quality. The result with reposado is rounder and considerably less interesting, so save the rested bottle for something stirred.

Master the Techniques

How to Shake a Cocktail Like a Pro

Tommy’s Margarita

The Tommy’s Margarita was born at Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco, where Julio Bermejo, working his family’s floor from the early 1990s, made two changes to the house margarita that became modern doctrine: out went the triple sec, in came agave syrup, and the well tequila became 100 per cent agave or nothing. The result carries his family’s restaurant name into every serious bar on earth. The logic is like-with-like. Orange liqueur, the classic margarita’s sweetener, brings its own flavour to the party; agave syrup brings only sweetness with the plant’s own accent, which lets the tequila stand at the front of its own drink. Three ingredients, and the spirit finally audible: the Tommy’s is less a variation than an argument about what a margarita is for. It is also the drink that taught a generation to read tequila labels. Bermejo evangelised 100 per cent agave bottlings from behind his bar decades before the category boomed, and the Tommy’s remains the fastest way to taste why the words on the label matter.

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.

Remember the Maine

Remember the Maine comes with a war correspondent attached. Charles H. Baker Jr. recorded it in The Gentleman’s Companion in 1939, having drunk it in Havana in 1933 with machine-gun fire in the streets outside, and his instruction survives alongside the spec: stir it briskly, and treat it “with the respect it deserves”. The name reaches back further still, to the battleship Maine, whose sinking in Havana harbour in 1898 lit the Spanish-American War under the headline the drink borrows. What Baker wrote down is a Manhattan that has been somewhere. Rye and sweet vermouth as expected, then cherry liqueur deepening the vermouth’s fruit into something darker, and a quarter-teaspoon of absinthe threading anise through all of it. Baker’s books are better literature than they are bartending, and a good many of his recipes need editing before they are drinkable. This one he transcribed straight, and it needs no correction: one of the great named Manhattans, with the rare quality of tasting like its own history.