Absolution

By Greg Burk

By Greg Burk

You are a sinner, and tequila is your punishment.

It ought to hurt when you drink it. Ignore the hundreds of marcas especiales on the yup market. Ignore the boîtes lo & hi mincing it out in flights of precious vesselettes. Save your money for a Glock. Get cheap white tequila and choke it down like a man.

Cheapness is tequila’s birthright: by the standards of other concentrated kickapoos, it’s damned easy to manufacture. Resourceless desperados first vatted it hundreds
of years ago in the Central Mexican high wastelands, so let’s spin on over to the cradle of harshness and see how and why they did it.

What do we got up here to make liquor from? Rocks? No. Sand? That’s just tiny rocks.

How about the pointy succulent over there, the blue one with the bat shit on it? Yes, the agave. It grows everywhere. You don’t have to cultivate it. You hardly even have to water it. Mash it up and throw it in the rain barrel with some yeast, come back in a few days and you’ve got ethyl alcohol.

Age it? You must be joking, my friend. We brought our guitars and we want to get plowed pronto! All this business about reposados and añejos sitting in casks for months and even years—we could get buried by bandits before then!

And gold tequila, what is that? Just clear/white/blanco tequila with toxic yellow food coloring and sugar. If we want a worse hangover, we’ll just have our white tequila with a bag of Chips Ahoy on the side, if that’s bueno with you.

This is an excerpt of an article originally published in Slake No. 2. To read the entire story, purchase or subscribe at shop.slake.la.