The Margarita

The final recipe

If you’re just here for the recipe, the perfect margarita is:

Ingredients

Ingredient	Amount
Tequila blanco Our pick: El Tesoro Blanco	1 ½ oz
Overproof tequila Our pick: Tapatío Blanco 110	½ oz
Cointreau	¾ oz
Agave nectar	⅙ oz (place ¼ oz into a measuring vessel, then pour measuring vessel into shaker until the first visible break in the stream)
Lime juice (squeezed without expressing oil from the peel by holding the fruit with one’s fingers and working a fork back and forth to release the juice)	½ oz

Preparation

To make one margarita:

1. Mix all ingredients above in a 2-piece shaker.

2. Fill the shaker ⅔ full with ~1-inch ice cubes directly from a freezer.

3. Shake the shaker vigorously for 15 seconds.

4. Strain the drink into a rocks glass over a single ~2-inch ice cube. Serve immediately.

The goal of a perfect margarita

There is a concept in philosophy called quiddity: the quality that most makes a thing what it is.

What is the quiddity of the margarita? And thus, what quality makes a perfect margarita?

One could take an ingredient-ist approach: The margarita is a tequila daisy. Therefore, finding the perfect margarita is a matter of mere proportion; of taking the concept of an “orange-liqueur tequila sour” and tweaking the ingredients logically implied by that concept to the correct balance.

One could take a cultural approach: The margarita is inseparable from context. It should taste like a drink from a Mexican restaurant in an American strip mall, its ubiquity on menus a testament to the resiliency of its concept. It should taste foolproof, whether the maker or the drinker is the fool; a salty, muddy rejection of precision-conscious cocktail culture.

Or one could take a flavor-journey approach: The perfect margarita has to take the drinker on a journey with each sip. Like all sours, sweetness must blossom early, followed quickly and pursued until the fade by tartness, with the base spirit and the complicating flavor (orange liqueur) remaining steady underneath.

A Perfect Drink advocates the flavor-journey approach. This gives us the freedom to reject certain iconic aspects of the margarita in favor of pacing and balance on the palate.

A review of the sources

According to Imbibe by David Wondrich, the drink we would now recognize as a margarita originated around 1929 at the Agua Caliente resort near Tijuana. The hotel’s signature drink was a twist on the daisy, a category of sour comprising a base spirit, lemon juice, and sugar (and, in some cases, grenadine). The version served at Agua Caliente replaced the base spirit (usually gin or whiskey) with tequila and a splash of soda.

Our earliest go-to cocktail references (The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, The Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book, Jerry Thomas Bartender’s Guide, The Savoy Cocktail Book) therefore make no mention of the margarita, although most mention the daisy, albeit with their typically cavalier approach to ingredient specificity (calling for either gin, rum or whiskey; lemon or lime juice; orange liqueur or grenadine). As Agua Caliente was popular with an American clientele, in 1936 the drink was first mentioned in print in a less-than-likely source north of the border: an Iowan daily newspaper called The Moville Mail, under the name “Tequila Daisy.”

Coincidentally, the first recognizable margarita recipe was published (as “the Picador”) in the same book that originated the 20th Century: William J. Tarling’s 1937 Café Royal Cocktail Book. The key elements (tequila, Cointreau, citrus, in a 2:1:1 ratio) are all there, although no sweetener is mentioned. Although the Picador became the margarita after a 1953 Esquire article popularized the name and added a salt rim, the recipe would remain largely unchanged for the next 50 years, aside from a few dalliances with Triple Sec.

In the late 80s, Julio Bermejo of Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco is credited with the most recent widely-adopted practice in margarita-making: introducing agave nectar as a sweetener. Most contemporary sources now use some form of sweetener—either simple syrup or agave—as a complement to the orange liqueur.

Author	Source	Year	Tequila oz	Tequila type	Orange liqueur oz	Orange liqueur type	Sweetener oz	Sweetener type	Lime juice oz	Preparation	Garnish
William J. Tarling	Café Royal Cocktail Book (as the Picador)	1937	½ glass (1 oz)	Tequila	¼ glass (½ oz)	Cointreau	None	None	¼ glass (½ oz) fresh lime or lemon juice	Shake	None
Unattributed	Esquire	1953	1	Tequila	1 dash	Triple Sec	None	None	Juice of ½ lime or lemon	Pour over crushed ice; stir. Rub the rim of a stem glass with rind of lemon or lime, spin in salt–pour, and sip.	None
Trader Vic	Trader Vic’s Bartender’s Guide	1972	1	Tequila	1/2	Triple sec	None	None	½	Shake…in shaker can with mixing glass…with ice cubes. Strain into chilled saucer champagne glass which has been rimmed with coarse salt.
Tommy’s Margarita	Punch	c. 1987	2	100% agave tequila	None	None	½	Agave nectar	1	Shake with ice and strain over ice into a rocks glass (with salt if you prefer).	Lime wedge
Dave Arnold	Liquid Intelligence	2014	2	Tequila	¾	Cointreau	1/4	Simple syrup	¾	Shake the ingredients together, strain into a glass with or without a salt rim according to your preference, and drink.	None
Tuxedo No. 2	TuxedoNo2.com	2014	2	Blanco tequila or reposado tequila	¾	Cointreau	None	None	¾	If to your taste, salt the rim of a glass Combine all ingredients with ice and shake Strain over crushed ice.	Lime wedge
Alex Day, David Kaplan, and Nick Fauchald	Death & Co.	2014	2	Siembra Azul blanco	¾	Cointreau	¼	Agave nectar	1	Half rim with salt. Shake and strain over ice cubes.	Lime wedge
Jim Meehan	Meehan’s Bartender’s Manual	2017	2	El Tesoro Platinum Tequila	¾	Cointreau	¼	Agave syrup (19:13 agave nectar:water)	¾	Shake with ice, then fine-strain into a chilled, half kosher salt-rimmed coupe.	Lime wedge
Alex Day, David Kaplan, and Nick Fauchald	Cocktail Codex (Classic recipe)	2018	2	Siembra Azul blanco	¾	Cointreau	¼	1:1 simple syrup	¾	Rub the lime wedge along the upper ½ inch of a double Old-Fashioned glass, halfway around. Roll the wet half in salt. Shake and strain over one large cube.	None (although lime wedge is pictured)
Simon Difford	DiffordsGuide.com	2020	1 ½	Patrón Reposado	¾	Triple sec (40%)	1/6	Agave nectar	¾	Shake with ice and strain into an ice-filled glass.	Lime wedge; salt rim, margarita bitters (4 drops), or saline solution (2 drops) optional
Dale DeGroff	The New Craft of the Cocktail	2020	1 ½	El Tesoro blanco	1	Cointreau	Splash, optional	Agave syrup (1:1 agave nectar and water)	¾	Frost half the rim of the glass. Shake with ice and serve over ice in an old-fashioned glass or up in a cocktail glass.	Lime wedge

Experimenting with the variables

Here are the independent variables we tuned to perfect the margarita:

• Proportions of the ingredients

• Choice of orange liqueur

• Choice of sweetener

• Choice of tequila

• Whether to split the tequila with a different agave spirit, and if so what type to split it with

• Choice of citrus

• Selection of glassware

• Type and amount of salt for rim

• Addition of extra water or saline solution