It started with Nixta Licor de Elote and Abasolo corn whiskey.
Without them, there would be no Elote Old-Fashioned, a drink that has become an increasingly common sight on cocktail menus from New York to Mexico City to London and beyond. The base can be anything from the aforementioned whiskey to mezcal, tequila and even genever—but always Nixta Licor de Elote, an indispensable ingredient that adds sweetness and subtle corn flavor to the template.
Both Nixta and Abasolo launched in April 2020; the Elote Old-Fashioned, meanwhile, was created around November 2019, says Cesar Sandoval, national portfolio ambassador with parent company Casa Lumbre, who was part of the team that devised it.
The drink was created at the distillery in Jilotepec, about an hour outside Mexico City, where a team of brand ambassadors from the U.S. and Mexico collaborated on a lineup of drinks that included both spirits. The goal was to create a recipe that would be easy for bars to replicate and riff upon. Entries ranged from highballs to a shaken Nixta Colada, but the straightforward Old-Fashioned would prove to be the standout. The original construct consisted of two ounces of Abasolo, a half-ounce of Nixta as the sweetener instead of sugar, plus Angostura bitters.
The drink was dubbed the Jilo Old-Fashioned, named for the distillery, “but it was a tough word for the American public to use,” recalls Sandoval. The revised Elote Old-Fashioned was the name that stuck, a reference to the popular Mexican street dish made with grilled corn, cotija cheese, crema and chile powder.
To be sure, bartenders have taken the original recipe and run with it, devising increasingly baroque variations. More often than not, bartenders land on the Elote Old-Fashioned construction independent of the brand’s efforts, simply finding the classic construction a natural fit for the popular corn liqueur.
Translating elote into liquid format is “not easy,” says Jose Luis Leon, creative director of Mexico City’s Licorería Limantour, and not everyone makes elote the same way, he adds. The introduction of Nixta “gave us the chance to show Mexican flavors in a different way, in a fine drinking experience.”
At Limantour, Leon fat-washes a mix of Abasolo whiskey, Nixta and mezcal with an earthy mix of butter, cacao nibs and nutmeg. But he inverts the formula, making Nixta the primary spirit in the drink, for a corn-forward flavor that’s more reminiscent of elote.
Elsewhere, at New York cocktail bar Romeo’s, owner Evan Hawkins skips whiskey altogether. A self-described “low-key corn obsessive” who grew up on a farm in rural Ohio, Hawkins opts for a split base of reposado and añejo mezcals, which he cooks sous vide for four hours with “Everything but the Elote” seasoning from Trader Joe’s (which includes cheese powder), black peppercorn and salt. The spice-infused mezcal is stirred with Nixta and Angostura and orange bitters, and garnished with a spice-dusted baby corn ear.
“Mezcal and corn go together like peas and carrots,” he says. “Agave and corn have that natural earthy sweetness, and that’s what makes the drink play so well.”
For some bartenders, the streamlined Old-Fashioned coupled with corn yields a blank and hospitable canvas for ever-fanciful concepts. Pietro Collina, bar director for Latin American–inspired Viajante87 in London, for example, layers corn upon corn upon corn.
To start, he homed in on the maltiness of Old Duff genever as the anchor, plus coconut-infused Michter’s bourbon, an American corn-based whiskey. To that he adds a neutral grain spirit macerated with hay, for “a dried-straw quality.” Combined with the requisite Nixta, the drink “mimics the experience of cracking a corn husk out in a field,” Collina explains, “so it feels like real corn off of a cob.” Distillate infused with blue masa, typically used to make tortillas, rounds out the flavor profile. The ingredients are stirred with ice and served with a torched dried corn husk, then finished with droplets of blue corn masa tincture, “so it smells like corn chips.”
In a sign that the drink has finally achieved mainstream status—a remarkable feat for a drink that didn’t exist a few years ago—it’s even on the menu at Frontera Cocina in Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort. This version is close to the original: Abasolo and Nixta, plus orange bitters. But it has its own twist as well, served in a “smoked bottle” sized for two.
“I knew [the drink] would get riffed on, but I didn’t know how many there would be,” says Sandoval. But he’s nonchalant about how it has taken off: “Corn is for everyone.”
