Tia Mia Cocktail Recipe

This Mai Tai riff will get its complicated flavors from a base of mezcal espadín and funky Jamaican rum. Blended with orange curaçao, orgeat, and contemporary lime juice, the Tia Mia is brilliant and balanced—a sublime antidote to the unsuccessful Mai Tai riffs that proliferate worldwide. (There are complete Reddit threads devoted to Mai Tai fails.)

Whereas the unique Mai Tai dates to the mid-Twentieth century, the Tia Mia is a newer entrant to the tropical cocktail canon. In 2010, the influential bartender and enterprise proprietor Julie Reiner opened the Hawaiian-themed restaurant and bar, Lani Kai, in New York Metropolis. Bartender Ivy Combine created the Tia Mia—an anagram of Mai Tai—for the drinks checklist, marking her debut recipe on certainly one of Reiner’s menus. Lani Kai closed after a two-year run, however the cocktail remained a neighborhood favourite. When Reiner and Combine partnered on Leyenda, a now-shuttered, James Beard Award-nominated Brooklyn bar that specialised in agave spirits, the Tia Mia was a menu staple. The cocktail can also be featured in Combine’s award-winning e-book, Spirits of Latin America.

To create the Tia Mia, Combine first tried floating an oz of mezcal on prime of the cocktail—a nod to the darkish rum used within the conventional serve. Ultimately, nonetheless, she included mezcal espadín, a extensively obtainable fashion continuously utilized in cocktails, immediately into the construct. Funky, earthy Jamaican rum includes the opposite half of the bottom and retains the flavors balanced. The remaining substances hew to conventional Mai Tai recipes, albeit with modified proportions.

Like many tropical drinks, the Tia Mia options orange curaçao, a sort of orange liqueur comprised of dried orange peels. Many fashionable manufacturers additionally incorporate dried herbs, giving them extra nuanced flavors than the brilliant citrus notes of many industrial triple secs. The Tia Mia makes use of much less curaçao than referred to as for within the basic Mai Tai, giving the drink much less perceived sweetness and permitting the spirits to shine.

The outcomes are drier and extra complicated than many tropical cocktail riffs. Better of all, the Tia Mia recipe is simple sufficient to enchantment to skilled and residential bartenders alike.