Liquids do not quench all thirsts

“Can I get something to drink?” a man asked immediately after I'd asked if I could help him. It was as innocuous a question if ever there was one. A drink? At a bar? What a novel idea. But it's a question that gets asked all the time.

Restaurants exist to provide food and drink. So, it would stand to reason that the people going there would want that and that the people there would provide it.

But not everybody who goes to a bar or restaurant wants just that. Sometimes they go to see and sometimes they go to be seen. Sometimes they eat. Sometimes they drink. Sometimes they do both and sometimes they do neither.

“I'm looking for mezcal,” he said.

“We only have three. It's not really our forte,” I said, pointing around at the steakhouse ambiance and the martini glass logo.

“Do you have any that are smoky?”

I paused before answering, as I always do before answering a question I am not sure I understand.

“You want a smoky mezcal?” I asked for clarification.

He nodded his head.

“Like more smoky than usual?”

“No.”

“Mezcal is smoky. That's pretty much its most defining characteristic.”

Boy was that the wrong answer.

He launched into a diatribe about all the possible incarnations of mezcal, including some that have little to no smoky flavor, most of which are so obscure that even a Google search cannot locate them.

“Mezcal is smoky. That's pretty much its most defining characteristic.” Boy was that the wrong answer.

Mezcal is often called the smoky cousin of tequila. Part of the difference is in the base material. Tequila must be made exclusively from blue agave. No other agave can be used. Most tequilas are 100% blue agave. But there is another category. If it's a “mixto,” it can be a mix of blue agave and sugar distillate. But it can never be another agave. Ever.

Mezcal is made from at least 30 varieties of agave. Mezcals can be just one type or a mix of two or more. However, mezcal cannot be made from blue agave. Ever.

But the source material is not the major difference in the two products. It's in their production. Mezcal is typically made in such a way that the smoke of the fire that cooks the agave interacts with it, causing it to be smokier tasting, much like how Scotch whisky is often smok

ier than its Celtic cousin, Irish whiskey, also due to its production method.

However, much like Scotch whisky and Irish whiskey, generalizations always have exceptions and the same is true for mezcal. But as with most exceptions, they are incredibly limited and often incredibly hard to find.

Midway through his soliloquy, I stopped him — I do have a job, after all — and pointed at the three more or less mainstream mezcals that we carried.

“Those are what we have,” I said, dumbing it down not so much for him, but for myself.

“Not all mezcal is smoky,” he said.

“OK.”

“They aren't.”

“OK,” I replied, elongating the pronunciation. “They aren't.”

He then ordered a tequila. And I moved on.

“I heard you talking to that guy about mezcal,” said a woman sitting three seats down making an uncomfortable amount of eye contact with me.

“Yeah.”

“I like mezcal,” she said, her eyes boring right into me.

“Great,” I said, looking away.

“It makes me want to take off all of my clothes.”

I looked up into her gaze at that.

“Huh?”

“You know, take off all my clothes.”

“OK,” I said, not sure where this was going.

“And have sex.”

Now I knew where it was going.

“Do you have any?” “What?” I asked, not knowing exactly which “any” she was asking about.

“Mezcal.” she clarified. “I don't,” I said. “But the restaurant does.”

The man three seats down then jumped back into the conversation.

“I'll get her a mezcal,” he said.

“Which one?” I asked. “It doesn't really matter.”

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• We often muddy up our lives with trivialities, at least until something important comes along.

• Questions themselves are sometimes more important than the answers.

• A technicality will often stop the flow of what comes naturally.

• Turned out the mezcal-loving woman was a psychologist. So, either she knew what she was doing, or she really knew what she was doing.

• “Not only the thirsty seek the water, the water as well seeks the thirsty,” wrote the Persian poet and mystic Rumi.

• Sometimes going into work is just going into work. And then again, sometimes it isn't.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty

Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an awardwinning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart. net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com