Tia Mia

Mai Tai

Victor "Trader Vic" Bergeron mixed the first Mai Tai in Oakland in 1944, and the story goes that his Tahitian guests took one sip and declared it maita'i roa ae: roughly, out of this world. The name stuck, the drink conquered the world, and the recipe has been argued about ever since, not least because Don the Beachcomber claimed he had invented it a decade earlier. History has largely sided with Vic. The original was built on a seventeen-year-old Jamaican rum from J. Wray and Nephew that no longer exists, and every serious Mai Tai since has been an attempt to reconstruct that flavour. What the recipe never contained was pineapple or orange juice. The fluorescent hotel-pool version of the 1970s buried one of the great cocktails under a fruit salad, and the modern revival has been a decades-long rescue operation. Properly made it is nearly a rum sour: dry, almond-rich and rum-forward, with the spent lime shell adding a bitter aromatic edge and the slapped mint doing the perfume. Crushed ice and real orgeat are not negotiable.

Oaxacan Old Fashioned

The Oaxacan Old Fashioned is the drink that put mezcal on the cocktail map: Phil Ward built it at New York’s Death & Co in 2007, splitting the Old Fashioned’s base between reposado tequila and smoky mezcal, sweetening with agave and finishing with the flamed orange twist. It became the template drink of the agave revolution and the most influential Old Fashioned variation of its generation. The split base is the design: tequila carries the body and oak, mezcal arrives as smoke and wildness over the top, and neither alone makes the drink. Agave syrup keeps the sweetening in the family, the bitters bridge to the Old Fashioned’s bones, and the flamed twist’s caramelised orange oils meet the mezcal’s smoke like two campfires agreeing. For drinkers, it remains the perfect introduction to mezcal: enough smoke to understand the category, enough structure to feel at home, and the Old Fashioned’s familiar silhouette holding the door open.

Naked and Famous

The Naked and Famous is a modern classic with a full pedigree on file. Joaquín Simó created it at Death & Co in 2011 and described it himself as the bastard love child of the Last Word and the Paper Plane, conceived in the mountains of Oaxaca. Equal parts mezcal, yellow Chartreuse, Aperol and lime: four loud ingredients at 22.5ml each, agreeing perfectly. It is the equal-parts formula’s smoky graduation. The Last Word proved four equal parts could balance, the Paper Plane translated the trick to whiskey and amaro, and this walks it into the mezcal age: smoke against honeyed Chartreuse, Aperol’s gentle bitterness bridging between them, lime holding the whole thing upright. No single ingredient leads, which with these four is the entire achievement. It has become the standard second mezcal drink, after an Oaxaca Old Fashioned has made the introduction: brighter, stranger and more talkative, and the fastest proof that smoke belongs in the sour family.