The name started to stick once I’d seen it a third or fourth time. There was a maximalist Bloody Mary in Oaxaca. A spicy Gold Rush in Los Angeles. A souped-up M&M in Brooklyn. Despite their dramatically different builds, the same chile liqueur pops up in each of these drinks, from coast to coast, across the continent.
Alma Tepec, whose name translates from Spanish and Nahuatl to “soul mountain,” is fairly new—it launched in 2021—but clearly, it has already caught bartenders’ attention. “I find it less sweet than other chile liqueurs, allowing us to best manage the overall balance of a drink,” says John Douglass, co-owner of Pretty Decent, a mezcal-focused bar in Louisville, Kentucky. He uses the ingredient in the bar’s Carajillo. “I like the slight hint of smoke and earthiness that it adds to the cocktail,” he says. Compared to brighter, greener spicy liqueurs, the flavor profile of this one is panseasonal, pairing with everything from cream soda to coconut, espresso to eggnog.
Alma Tepec is made from smoke-dried pasilla mixe chiles, peppers that are native to Oaxaca and often used in Mexican sauces. That culinary connection makes it a go-to for the food-inspired drinks that have recently taken over cocktail menus. Take, for example, the Margarita inspired by tamales at Los Angeles’ Here’s Looking at You.
But Alma Tepec shines in more minimalist applications, too. Bar Tobalá in Melbourne spotlights the liqueur in its Part Time Friend, an equal-parts shaken drink where it simply joins amaro, ginger and lime. Miss B’s Coconut Club, in San Diego, throws it into a Batanga. And Danny Rubenstein, who uses the liqueur in the aforementioned tamal Margarita, also recommends keeping the spirit in the freezer and enjoying it neat as a spicy shot—“Let’s be real, Alma Tepec is far better than Fireball,” he says.
