The Ghost Of Chapala
Recipe:
- 35ml Vallendar Orangengeist (orange eau de vie)
- 25ml reposado tequila
- 7.5ml dry curacao
- 7.5ml agave syrup
- 1 bsp Suze
- 20ml organic, unsweetened oat milk
- 1 dash cardamom bitters
- 1 dash celery bitters
- (rinse with) Del Maguey Vida mezcal
Give the oat milk into your shaker, foam up, add the other ingredients except the mezcal and shake on big ice cubes until sufficiently chilled. Rinse/perfume your prechilled ceramic mug with the mezcal, strain your drink straight up (without ice) into the mug, garnish with a dehydrated lime wheel.
An aroma of orange, zests, herbs and smoke, but all through a gentle filter thanks to the milk that ties it together nicely. The same plays out on the palate, the orange and tequila merge to a fresh vegetal orange note with subtle sweetness up front, then the herbs of the Suze and bitters come in for complexity, the Curacao should only expand the orange, the smoke as a subtle foot note. The drink was supposed to seem like something you could imagine drinking a hundred years ago in a beautiful, Mexican village.
Although oranges are very much associated with Mexico, they didn't arrive until the settlers with the 2nd Columbus voyage. To quote from a website (regarding the drink name):
"For instance, in an early account of the town of Chapala, Father Antonio Tello, wrote that, “In 1562, Father Sebastián de Párraga came to this friary [Chapala] and planted the church’s orange trees.”
A later account describes Chapala in 1586 as having so many fruit trees that “the entire village is like an orchard. The Indians make a lot of orange blossom water and from it a lot of money. It is so fertile for oranges that, in the garden of the friary where there are many of these trees, they took from a sweet orange tree a branch that had eleven good, big, mature, yellow oranges, crammed together on top of each other.”
