American Agave with Gian Nelson of Jano Spirits

Featured Cocktail: The Batanga

This episode’s featured cocktail is the Batanga. To make it, you’ll need:

• 2 ounces tequila (generally, a silver tequila is utilized, but you can feel free to substitute with any agave spirit of your choosing)
• 1/2 ounce lime juice
• 3 ounces Cola
• Salt for rimming the glass.

Begin by slicing a fresh lime, squeezing it for juice, and rubbing a spent half around the rim of a highball glass. Next, rim the glass with salt and fill it with ice. Since this is a built drink in the style of a Cuba Libre, all you need to do is add your agave spirit, lime juice, and cola to top (in that order), and, important to the ritual of this drink, stir it with the knife you used to cut the lime. Garnish simply with a lime wheel or a nice lime twist and enjoy.

The Batanga was invented in the 1960s at a bar in Tequila called “La Capilla” by owner and bartender Don Javier Delgado Corona. In this cocktail, we see the confluence of multiple drink trends. Most notable, we have the collision of the Cuba Libre format with the ever-popular Mexican salt rim, which is commonly used to adorn drinks like Margaritas and Micheladas. Another particularly romantic aspect of this cocktail is that Don Javier is alleged to have used his prep knife to stir each drink, imparting the flavor of the lime (plus potentially other savory dishes like salsas and guacamoles). 

The Batanga is having what we can only call “a moment” right now. And this kinda makes sense. You can only have so many Espresso Martinis before you start looking for something new. But let’s take a moment to appreciate what the Batanga brings to the table. It takes perhaps the least-inspired call drink (booze and coke), changes the base spirit to something interesting, revives the Cuba Libre format by insisting on the lime, adds a twist with a salt rim, and begs for a little bit of ritual with the signature serve knife stir. That’s a whole lot of surface area that a regular old rum and coke doesn’t bring to the table–a lot of little opportunities for creative bartenders to wiggle into the spec and make this drink their own.

Some have done this by adding a little bit of amaro as a reference to the “Fernet & Coke” trend that’s popular in many parts of central and South America. Others look to similar aromatized ingredients like Ancho Reyes chili liqueur to simulate the jalapenos that might have graced the cutting board of Don Javier Delgado Corona more than 60 years ago. Of course, you can also get in there and fiddle with the salt rim, or the cola, or citrus profile, but I’ll leave that for you to decide.