TEQUILA DRINKER’S GUIDE

Here is the correct right way to drink tequila: Open the bottle, pour some into a glass, and swallow it.

We risk being obvious only because so many more elaborate methods have been invented for drinking tequila, and for getting drunk on it. The most popular one, known as the Mexican itch, is to bracket hammered-back shots of it by licking salt off the base of one’s thumb and squeezing a wedge of lime between one’s teeth—a slavering ritual that makes the drinker sound like a bulldog sucking a mouthful of Jell-O. It also is frequently slugged back neat with a bottle of beer: a bordertown boilermaker. For a slammer, the liquor is combined in a glass with champagne, tonic, or soda, banged on the table a couple of times until it fizzes, then gulped in one greedy, effervescent swallow. It seems fair to say that in none of these examples is the act of tequila-drinking an expression of connoisseurship or gentility: the point is to ingest the stuff fast and get drunk.

Tequila doesn’t necessarily deserve its rowdy reputation. Like fine Kentucky bourbon, it is distilled with care and precision. The best, made from the heart of the agave plant, is aged in smoke-flavored, wax-lined barrels until it is as suave as good cognac. However, such smooth tequila is fairly rare, and most drink-’til-you-drop brands are about as tasty—and as effective—as chloroform. Tequila has always had a certain outlaw swagger about it in the United States, conjuring up images of dusty cantinas where cowboys pass out on the floor, shoot holes in the ceiling, or fall in love with a pretty señorita (or all three, in reverse order).

The most fearsome tequila is mezcal con gusano, known as mescal, which is made without the polish of double-distilling and aging and with the added attraction of a dead maguey worm (that’s the “con gusano” part, and it is actually a caterpillar) submerged in the bottom of the bottle. The worm, which feeds on the agave plant, was originally packaged in mescal as proof that there was enough alcohol in the booze to preserve it. It is widely believed to induce hallucinations, or at least to make whoever drains the bottle’s dregs into an ornery son of a buck. In fact, the worm is considered by protozoa connoisseurs to be so excellent that mescal is sometimes drunk like tequila, by the shot with chaws of lime, but with heaps of crushed, mummified worms on the side to lick in lieu of salt.

Tequila’s bellicose reputation has mellowed in recent years, thanks mostly to the popularity of frozen margaritas, which have helped establish its image as a fun libation for civilized middle-class people. Whipped into a frothy confectionery cooler the color of folding money and about as sweet as a green river, tequila nowadays needn’t seem any more dangerous than sloe gin.