A Fun National Tequila Day story for 12×75

Every year we say the same thing: this time, we do it properly.

National Tequila Day, the 24th of July, and the plan is always identical and always beautiful. A civilised evening. Three, maybe four of London’s best agave bars. Good anejo, sipped slowly from proper glasses, like the sophisticated drinks people we absolutely are. Notes will be taken. Someone might say “vegetal.” We will nod knowingly.

This has never once happened.

It starts well enough. This year we began in Soho, at a little mezcaleria I will not name because they do not deserve what follows. I ordered a flight of anejo and launched, as I do every single year, into my annual sermon: that there is no worm in tequila, there never has been, the worm lives in certain cheap mezcals and is frankly a red flag, and if anyone at this table orders a bottle with a worm in it I will walk directly into the Thames. My friends have heard this speech eleven times. They mouth it along with me now, like a hymn.

Then Dave arrives.

Dave does not sip. Dave has never sipped anything in his life. Dave takes one look at the carefully chosen reposado I have just described to the bartender using the phrase “gently oaked,” and orders six shots with salt and lime “to get us going.” Every year I explain that this is not how you honour a spirit with two and a half centuries of history behind it. Every year Dave has already done the shots before I reach the end of the sentence.

By bar two, the tasting notes have degraded. “Vegetal” has become “tastes like a garden,” which has become “tastes like Dave’s garden,” which nobody can explain and nobody wants to. I am still, heroically, trying to explain the difference between additive-free tequila and the cheap mixto stuff to a bartender who is extremely busy and did not ask. She nods at me the way you nod at a stranger describing their dream.

Somewhere around bar three, the July weather does what London July weather does, which is to pretend to be November. We are caught in the sort of rain that feels personal. We shelter in a doorway. Dave, undeterred, produces a hip flask from somewhere unspeakable. I decline on principle, then accept on a different principle.

The rest is impressionistic. There was a heated debate about whether a Paloma is a superior drink to a Margarita, which it is, and I will die on that hill. There was an attempt to teach everyone the proper way to taste, holding the tequila on the tongue and breathing out gently through the nose, that ended the moment Dave breathed out through his nose mid-shot and had to go and sit down quietly for a while. And there was, inevitably, the kebab. There is always a kebab.

Then the night bus, that great equaliser, where the sophisticated agave enthusiasts of six hours earlier sit in damp, contented silence, while one of us softly insists to a total stranger that “there’s no worm, mate, that’s mezcal, honestly, look it up.”

Here is the thing, though. Every year I plan the civilised version, and every year it becomes this instead, and every year I wake up on the 25th of July slightly wounded and entirely happy. Because the point was never really the tasting notes. The point is that once a year, a group of people who genuinely love this daft, brilliant, endlessly misunderstood spirit get together to honour it in the least dignified way imaginable, and then call it research.

So happy National Tequila Day. Sip it properly if you can. And if you can’t, if there is a Dave in your life, buy the good stuff anyway, skip the worm, and save room for the kebab.

We will do it properly next year.

We won’t. See you on the 24th.