Six mezcal cocktails worth making at home

Mezcal is a cocktail spirit second and a sipping spirit first – meaning the bottles you'd reach for neat are usually too expensive (and too aromatically dense) to mix. The right cocktail mezcal is in the $25-40 range, espadín or espadín-led ensamble, 42-45% ABV. Banhez Ensamble, Del Maguey Vida, or Mestiza Negra are the three bottles we use for nearly every recipe below.

1. Mezcal margarita. Two ounces mezcal, one ounce fresh lime, three-quarters ounce simple syrup or agave nectar. Shake with ice, strain, salt rim. Skip the orange liqueur. Full recipe and the four ways to mess it up are in the dedicated guide.

2. Mezcal Negroni. One ounce mezcal, one ounce Campari, one ounce sweet vermouth. Stir with ice for thirty seconds, strain over a large rock, garnish with orange peel. The smoke replaces the gin's juniper as the bitter-balancer; the drink reads richer and more savory than the gin original. The cocktail substitution that converts gin Negroni drinkers without an explanation. Use Banhez or Vida; a more aggressive bottle will fight the Campari.

3. Mezcal Old Fashioned (the Oaxaca Old Fashioned). Phil Ward's drink at Death & Co., still the canonical recipe: 1.5 ounces tequila, 0.5 ounces mezcal, 1 teaspoon agave nectar, two dashes of orange bitters. Stir with ice, strain over a rock, expressed orange peel. The tequila is the body; the mezcal is the seasoning – half an ounce is enough to push the whole drink toward smoke without overwhelming. If you don't have tequila, do 2 ounces mezcal and 1 teaspoon agave with two dashes of mole bitters; lower-key, still good.

4. Mezcal Paloma. Two ounces mezcal, one ounce fresh grapefruit, half ounce fresh lime, half ounce simple, top with chilled grapefruit soda (Squirt or Topo Chico Toronja). Salt rim. Build over ice in a tall glass. The Paloma forgives more than the margarita does – the carbonation and the secondary citrus take pressure off the spirit, so a softer mezcal works fine. Vida is our default here.

5. Mezcal Mule. Two ounces mezcal, three-quarters ounce fresh lime, top with ginger beer (Cock'n Bull or Fever-Tree work; Q is too sweet). Build over crushed ice in a copper mug, garnish with a lime wheel. The ginger does what the citrus does in a margarita: gives the smoke a foil. Banhez over Vida; Mestiza if you have it.

6. Naked & Famous. Equal parts mezcal, Aperol, yellow Chartreuse, fresh lime – three-quarters ounce of each. Shake hard, double strain into a coupe. No garnish. Joaquín Simó's 2011 invention at Death & Co. – the modern classic that introduced more bartenders to mezcal than any other recipe. The Chartreuse and Aperol carry the bittersweet weight; the mezcal adds smoke without dominating. The hardest of these to mess up.

Practical notes. Always use fresh-squeezed citrus – bottled lime is acidic but missing the volatile oils that make a mezcal cocktail aromatic. Pre-batched mezcal cocktails work for the Negroni (two weeks refrigerated) but not for anything with citrus (two days max). Salt rims should be plain kosher salt unless you're explicitly going for a sal-de-gusano effect. And: if a recipe calls for crème de menthe or blue curaçao or anything else with food coloring, it isn't a mezcal cocktail.

If you're stocking a home bar with one cocktail mezcal: Banhez. If you have $20 and want a margarita tonight: Mestiza Negra. If you have $35 and want every drink in this article: Vida. None of those three is wrong; the differences come down to whether you want aromatic complexity (Banhez) or batch consistency (Vida) or sheer value (Mestiza).