El Diablo: The Tequila Highball Tiki Bars Half-Forgot

This one is built in the glass, which is the whole point. No shaker tin, no theater, no straining a perfectly good drink into another vessel for no reason. Fill a Collins glass with cubed ice, the bigger and harder the better, because you want dilution slow and the fizz preserved. Pour the tequila blanco, the cassis, and the fresh lime over the top. Then top with cold ginger beer and give it one gentle stir, just enough to introduce everybody. The carbonation does the rest of the mixing as it climbs. Two non-negotiables. The lime has to be squeezed that day, because bottled lime juice tastes like regret. And the ginger beer has to actually bite. The sweet, flat, ginger-flavored sodas marketed at people who fear flavor will leave you with a limp, candied mess. You want heat and spice fighting the cassis for the back of your throat. A lime wedge on the rim, and you're done.

Here is the thing nobody tells you. The El Diablo is a daisy, which is what you get when you take a complete sour and swap part of the sweetener for a liqueur with an opinion. The sour is right there in the bones: spirit, citrus, and something sweet, the same skeleton holding up every Daiquiri and every Sidecar ever poured. The crème de cassis is the structural liqueur, sitting at a half ounce, never overpowering the tequila that leads. That half-ounce floor is exactly where things get interesting, because at that measure the cassis behaves almost like simple syrup with a personality, which means the El Diablo brushes right up against the Daiquiri family too. It belongs to both, legitimately. The ginger beer on top is the lengthener, the move that turns a short, intense sour into a long, sessionable highball. It's the same logic behind a Bramble reaching for blackberry liqueur, or a Hotel Nacional leaning on apricot. Pick your liqueur, respect the base, lengthen if you feel like it. That's the daisy, and it's one of the most forgiving templates in the entire bar.

The El Diablo turned up in Trader Vic's Book of Food and Drink back in 1946, originally going by the considerably less marketable name of Mexican El Diablo. Vic had a gift for borrowing flavors from everywhere and giving them a tiki paint job, and this was tequila long before most American drinkers had any idea what to do with it. The cassis is the giveaway, a very European, very un-tropical ingredient that has no business working as well as it does next to agave. But it does. The blackcurrant goes dark and jammy against the vegetal snap of the tequila, the lime keeps it honest, and the ginger beer kicks the whole thing in the ribs. For decades it sat in the dusty back pages of tiki history while the Mai Tai and the Zombie hogged the spotlight. That's a shame and also an opportunity, because it means almost nobody has a bad El Diablo memory to overcome. It's an easy drink to love and an even easier one to make, which in the cocktail world usually counts against a drink's reputation. People distrust anything that doesn't require suffering. Ignore them. Build one tall, drink it on a porch, and understand why Vic kept it in the book.