My One-Stop Cinco De Mayo Guide To All (Well, Some) Of Your Agave Needs

Tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo, and we all know what that means — it’s time to drink some tequila! One of the only upsides to our nationwide lockdown is that it’ll be easier to forego the awful frozen concoctions made with bottom-shelf tequila, sour mix and artificial coloring that pass for chain restaurant margaritas. But if you’re not an experienced home bartender, the thought of making your own tequila cocktails may be a little intimidating. I’m no bartender, and besides, there are plenty of cocktail recipes — some of which are actually pretty decent — floating around online. But if you want to know what booze to buy for your Cinco celebration, I’ve got you covered, more or less.

First off, it’s Robb Report’s round-up of a whole bunch of tequilas, some of them written up by me.

Check out my guide to aged sipping tequilas here, via HuffPost. It was written back in 2012, and there have been approximately 347,000 new brands launched since then, but the ones here are still by and large my go-tos.

Also from HuffPost, one of my favorite pieces, in which a few of my industry friends and I got together, drank a lot of tequilas, talked about them, and recorded the proceedings, which I then transcribed. Read it here.

If you’re just not feeling tequila-ish but want to celebrate Cinco de Mayo with agave spirits, there’s always mezcal — when I first tried it (I believe it was Pierde Almas) about ten years ago, I fell so completely in love that I didn’t want to drink tequila again for a couple of years. Check out my Robb Report mezcal guide here.

If you’re looking to impress your hipster friends when you do your virtual Cinco drinking session on Zoom, check out my Robb Report piece on sotol, a venerable agave spirit that’s a relative newcomer to the States.

And if you’ve got margaritas on your mind, you can’t forget the orange liqueur (also known as triple sec or curaçao)! Here’s my round-up of some of the best (they make for tasty sipping, too).