The Spirits #20: The Mexican Jumping Bean

~ Damn Good Coffee ~ My Claim to Fame ~ Messed Up Spiders ~ Coffee, Cigarettes and Tears ~

~ THE MEXICAN JUMPING BEAN ~

50ml tequila
30ml freshly made espresso
15ml agave syrup

Chill a cocktail glass. Prepare an espresso however you see fit and measure out. Stir in the agave syrup while it’s still hot. Fill a shaker with even more ice than you usually would in order to rapidly cool the coffee. Now throw in the sweet espresso and tequila and shake it vigorously until your fingers are numb. Fine-strain through a tea-strainer into your chilled glass and garnish with coffee beans if you have any.

Some MJB pointers:

1) Tequila-wise, as last week, the best shout is 100% agave tequila reposado style - but the blanca (aka silver) style will work fine too. And yes, this works pretty well with mezcal too.

2) Do not whatever you do apply a salt rim here.

3) If you are in the mood, you could always lengthen this with milk, latte style, turn it into a White Mexican.

iHOLA! 

Some MUSICA to caffeinate yourself with. You will find instructions for making sugar syrup, grenadine, ice, etc here and my 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS here. I have also assembled some bottle recommendations for a cabinet here - and this here is the full archive of weekly specials. Do please share the Spirits with anyone who might like it - and feel free to tag me with your creations on Instagram ou même Twitter!

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I INVENTED THIS ONE! ME! Yes, it’s true. It even has a mildly glamorous origin story.

One afternoon a few years ago, I ran into my friends Cleo and Stewart in a bar near my old work in Kensington. Cleo and Stewart make Aqua Riva tequila for a living and I always had the impression they drank it for a living too - as it is generally impossible to spend more than three minutes in their company without a tray of Tommy’s Margaritas arriving. We took up residence at a table. We drank Margaritas. And then some more. And after five or six, I felt the need to mix things up a bit. All that lime juice - I’m sure it was the lime juice - began to have a slightly pixelating affect. So I asked the bartender if he could make a Margarita with fresh espresso in place of the lime. The result was a Mexican take on the Espresso Martini.

It did exactly what I had intended it to do - fired the synapses, cleansed the palate, cleared the way for another - and it proved an instant hit. Cleo has evangelised the drink. I believe it has actually appeared on a few cocktail menus. And - hot off the press - Aqua Riva now makes a ready-to-drink version. Sadly, however, I only came up with the name Mexican Jumping Bean (clever, right?) in retrospect so the drink is therefore popularly known as the Mexpresso Martini. But you can’t have it all, and besides, this is precisely the sort of minor complication that cocktailing history is littered with and which people in hundreds of years will write newsletters about.

Last week, I enumerated a few reasons why I believed the Tommy’s Margarita to be superior to the actual Margarita. Many of these points hold for the MJB vs Dick Bradsell’s original Vodka Espresso (aka the Espresso Martini.) Most recipes for the Espresso Martini contain vodka, sugar syrup, coffee liqueur and coffee. Agave is a more flavourful sweetener than sugar syrup and tequila is a more flavourful spirit than vodka, so that’s a win-win. Tequila and coffee have a definite affinity too (see Patrón’s extremely expensive and popular agave coffee liqueur). Plus the coffee liqueur in the Espress Martini has always struck me as redundant. The drink loses nothing by removing it and in fact gains a certain clarity.

I’ve no doubt that a coffee-person - I mean someone who really cares about this blends and grinds and altitude and things like that - could take this drink to heights of sophistication. I love coffee and couldn’t function without it. I consider it an essential pleaure. I once tried to go without it for a piece and gave up at 10.23am concluding that I was appallingly addicted, but happily so. However, my primary concern with coffee is usually that it’s black enough and strong enough, not that it has phenolic notes or a delicate suggestion of elderberries or whatever; life is too short to be over-particular about cocktails and over-particular about coffee. Perhaps I feel this way because my initial romance was with low-grade instant coffee as a teenager. Oh those caffeinated nights, staying up in my parents’ house, writing sub-Kerouac-type streams of consciousness, fired by Gold Blend, sugar and Marlboro Lites! No greater high. Incidentally this is how caffeine affects spiders as compared to other drugs:

Nevertheless, while I refuse to get too prescriptive about coffee, the amateur cocktaileur will take pride in all of the liquids that she serves - and a little care over coffee won’t go amiss. Lord knows many people make it badly. I find an Aeropress to be the best way of making espresso at home if you don’t have a fancy machine; it isn’t expensive. Nor is an Italian Moka pot (the second best way). Two tiny tips. One, don’t use boiling water. It scalds the coffee. Allow the kettle to cool a bit - or just add a splash of cold water before pouring over the beans. And two, the longer your leave the grinds in the water, the stronger the coffee will be. I like to leave the Aeropress hanging for a while - leave the plunger partially in for a minute and it will create a vacuum that allows the coffee to infuse for a minute or so before the last plunge.

Your challenge this weekend is to drink three Mexican Jumping Beans and spin a web.

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PLAYLIST

A series of odes to the wonder of coffee.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

Actually I’ve sort of run out of time to do this properly - been a busy week here! - but here are two pieces about coffee you might enjoy:

Here’s a great piece on the significance of coffee in Twin Peaks (Eater)

Here’s an interview I did a couple of years’ back with Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a Yemeni-American who imports the finest coffee in the world from a warzone and whose amazing story was the subject of Dave Eggers’ book The Monk of Mokha, which really changed the way I thought about coffee. (The Times)

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SHOPPING LIST

Gin, Campari, orange liqueur, lemon.

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