Episode 254

Featured Cocktail: The Mexican Firing Squad

This episode’s featured cocktail is The Mexican Firing Squad. To make it, you’ll need:

• 2 ounces tequila
• 3/4 ounce lime juice
• 3/4 ounce grenadine
• 5 dashes Angostura bitters

Combine these ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice, give em’ a good, hard shake until the contents are chilled and properly diluted, then strain into a rocks glass over ice, garnish with a lime wheel, and enjoy.

First published in Charles H. Baker’s book, titled, The Gentleman’s Companion, Or, Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask, this cocktail was said to have been discovered in Mexico City in 1937 and is ostensibly a daisy variant that skews less sweet and more sour than most, but benefits from the rosy hue of grenadine and the herbal complexity of angostura bitters.

We wanted to feature this cocktail because we think it shines a beautiful light on the creative process of Ryan and his team. They’ve served a version of it at Dandelyan called the Mexican Firing Squad 2.0. This rendition keeps the tequila and lime juice, but swaps out the Angostura bitters for a combo of mole bitters and chili liqueur and then employs an agar gel clarification technique – something out of reach for most home bartenders – to create a tomato grenadine.

And hopefully as you listen to our conversation, you’ll almost be able to envision how this creative process went. Baker’s books are known for being extremely colorful – filled with the kinds of bizarre details and fanciful stories that fuel Ryan’s creative framework. So, he’s in this bizarre book, he comes across this somewhat lopsided tequila daisy recipe, and says, “how can we have fun with this drink?” Mole bitters and Ancho Reyes were popular at the time, so they’re logical choices, but how can he get in there and mess with the notion of grenadine?

Unfortunately, we can only speculate about the conversations and experiments that led to the Mexican Firing Squad 2.0, so we can’t tell you where the notion of a “tomato grenadine” came from, but it’s safe to say that it both preserved the visual identity of the cocktail as a rosy-hued daisy on the rocks while simultaneously advancing the conversation about savory preparations with trademark playfulness and whimsy.