The One Drink and the No-Drink
Fire Escape Sunset: Watermelon, Basil, and Ancho Tequila Cooler
Watermelon juice is ninety-two percent water and it will happily turn a good cocktail into a rumor. The chile goes on the garnish, not the rim, so the heat stays a choice.
Serve alongside
Tacos with a lot of lime, or watermelon and cucumber under chile salt. Ancho is smoky-sweet rather than hot and it goes quiet next to anything rich — keep the plate bright and salted.
Tools
Collins glasses, a shaker, a fine sieve, and a blender. No blender? Watermelon is soft enough to mash through a sieve with a fork and the back of a ladle, which takes four minutes and produces a cleaner juice than a blender does. A small plate for dusting the garnish.
Ingredients · swaps in parentheses
Blanco tequila (a good mezcal, if you want the smoke), watermelon, lime, sugar, fresh basil, ancho chile liqueur (a pinch of ground ancho plus a splash of agave, in a pinch), sparkling water, flaky salt, ground ancho chile
Magic
Do not rim the glass. Dust the watermelon wedge instead — ground ancho and flaky salt pressed onto the cut face, propped on the rim. A salted rim is a tyranny: every sip is saltier and hotter than the one before and the drinker has no vote. On the garnish, the chile sits an inch under the nose the whole time and only enters the drink if someone decides to take a bite. Not feeling brave? Rim half the glass and turn the unsalted side toward the guest.
Gotcha
Basil steeps for 10 minutes off the heat and not a minute more. At 15 the syrup goes olive-brown and tastes like hay, and at any point where the leaves touch actually boiling liquid they go black instantly. Sugar dissolved, pan off the burner, then basil.
Watermelon is ninety-two percent water, which is the entire challenge. Juice it and you have a beautiful pink liquid with almost nothing structural in it, and if you build a drink around a full three ounces of it you get a rumor of a cocktail. One ounce is the correct number. It reads as watermelon at one ounce because the smell does most of the work, and the tequila and lime still have somewhere to stand.
Blend the flesh with nothing added, then strain through a sieve without pressing. Pressing forces through the pale pulp that makes the juice cloudy and, within an hour, faintly cooked-tasting.
Basil syrup
Heat 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 cup water until the sugar dissolves, then take the pan off the burner entirely. Wait a minute, add 1 packed cup of basil leaves, and steep 10 minutes. Strain and chill. It keeps five days and turns duller-green every one of them without losing much flavor.
One drink
- 1 1/2 oz blanco tequila
- 1 oz fresh watermelon juice
- 3/4 oz lime juice
- 1/2 oz basil syrup
- 1/4 oz ancho chile liqueur
- 2 oz sparkling water
- Pinch of salt
- Basil sprig and watermelon wedge
The pour, drawn to scale
- blanco tequila1 1/2 oz25%
- fresh watermelon juice1 oz17%
- lime juice3/4 oz13%
- basil syrup1/2 oz8%
- ancho chile liqueur1/4 oz4%
- sparkling water2 oz33%
Shake tequila, watermelon, lime, syrup, chile liqueur, and salt with ice — hard, twelve seconds, because there is a lot of water in this and it needs the chill more than the dilution. Strain into an ice-filled Collins glass. Top with sparkling water and garnish. Slap the basil sprig once against your palm before it goes in; unslapped basil is a green object, slapped basil is an ingredient.
The garnish does the heavy lifting
Cut a wedge about half an inch thick, press one cut face into a small plate of flaky salt mixed with ground ancho at roughly four parts salt to one part chile, and notch it onto the rim. The dusted face should point inward, toward the drinker. Every time the glass comes up, the ancho arrives before the liquid does, which makes the quarter-ounce of chile liqueur in the build taste like considerably more than a quarter ounce.
Ice
Fill the Collins glass properly, all the way to the top with cubes. A tall glass half-full of ice has more air, more surface area, and less thermal mass, and it will dilute faster than a glass packed solid. This is the one thing worth being rigid about on a hot day.
For a crowd
Combine everything except sparkling water up to four hours ahead. Add bubbles per glass. Watermelon juice separates — give it thirty minutes in the fridge and it splits into a pale layer and a pink one. That is not spoilage, it is settling, and a stir with a spoon puts it back. Do not strain it again to fix the look. You will strain out the drink.
Cut and dust the garnishes an hour ahead on a sheet pan and refrigerate. The salt will pull a little juice out of the cut face and make a glossy chile lacquer, which is better than the dry version.
The zero-proof route
This converts well, which is not true of every tequila drink. Drop the tequila and the ancho liqueur. Replace with 1 1/2 oz of strong chilled green tea, 1/4 oz agave syrup, and a generous pinch of ground ancho shaken in with everything else. The tea supplies the dryness the tequila was supplying, and the ground chile brings heat that the liqueur was bringing along with sugar you no longer need. Same dusted wedge on the rim. It is a genuinely good drink and nobody has to be told which version they got.
What to eat with it
Anything charred and salty off a grill. Corn with lime. Carnitas tacos. It also handles a bowl of very salty popcorn better than a cocktail this pretty has any right to.
Part of Drinks & Zero-Proof.
Where this goes next
