DESERT/DELUGE

Damiana is a small yellow-flowered shrub that grows wild across the Chihuahuan Desert. The Guaycura people of northern Mexico have been fermenting it into ceremonial drinks for centuries. It carries a reputation as an aphrodisiac.

Sotol is the spirit of the Chihuahuan Desert, where you currently sit. The desert plant grows on rocky slopes, takes fifteen years to mature, and yields one bottle per plant. It tastes like the desert: mineral, green, a little wild.

They grew up together, so we put them in the same glass. While the drink is stirred, your glass sits inverted over smoldering damiana leaf. The smoke is already there when the sotol arrives.

A Marfa sunrise moves through a specific sequence. Deep indigo at the horizon. Then a band of violet. Then burnt orange. Then pale gold at the top of the sky. It takes about four minutes and it is worth getting up for.

This drink does the same thing in ninety seconds. Four layers, poured in order, each one denser than the last. The butterfly pea flower starts indigo and shifts violet as the acid from the prickly pear layer climbs. The magenta band is prickly pear fruit we pick by hand from the cactus in our yard, and buy from local foragers when we need a bit more. The saffron and agave hold the gold. Nothing in the glass is dye.

One instruction: don't stir it. Watch it for a minute first.

The Salt River Valley grew citrus before it grew Phoenix. Through most of the last century the valley floor was orchards: grapefruit, oranges, lemons, running in rows to the base of the mountains. When I visited my grandmother there in winter as a child, the smell of citrus greeted me every morning.

Bacanora is the spirit of Sonora, distilled from wild agave in the mountains south of the border. It was illegal in Mexico for most of the twentieth century, which tells you something about how good it is. It is brighter and greener than mezcal, with almost no smoke.

Caliche is the hard layer of calcium carbonate that sits just under the desert floor. Every rancher in the Trans-Pecos has cursed it and every desert plant that survives out here has learned to live on the water it traps. It is the reason anything grows in this landscape at all.

A shrub is a drinking vinegar. Ours is built from apple cider vinegar, honey from hives two hours south of here, and desert sage that we grow ourselves. It steeps for five days and gets better for two weeks after that.

This is what I make for myself in August.

Elote is corn on the cob, charred on a grill and dressed with mayonnaise, cotija cheese, chile powder, and lime, sold from carts on every street corner in Mexico. It is one of the great street foods of the world. We made it a drink.

Nixta is a liqueur distilled from cacahuazintle corn in Jilotepec, the birthplace of corn itself. It tastes like liquid masa. The mezcal brings the char. The heat comes from chiltepin, the wild pea-sized pepper native to this desert.

This is the maximum amount of umami we could fit in a glass.

Every spring, Douglas fir trees push out new growth at the tips of their branches. For a few weeks the tips are bright green and soft. We pick them by hand in Oregon in April and steep them into Texas vodka on the day of harvest.

This is the only spirit on the menu we make ourselves, from trees on our property in the Willamette Valley. The name is for the moment the first storm of the season hits a dry forest in the fall. The whole point was to catch that smell. This is as close as we've gotten.

The Daintree is the oldest rainforest on earth. It has been growing continuously for 130 million years, which means it predates the Amazon. Some of the plants inside it exist nowhere else and have no living relatives.

The finger lime is the reason to order this drink. An Australian rainforest fruit that holds its juice in hundreds of tiny pearls. We sprinkle some over the foam at the moment of service. They look like green caviar and they pop when you bite them.

A cloud forest is what happens when a rainforest climbs a mountain. At altitude, the canopy sits permanently inside the clouds, and everything drips all the time. Orchids grow on the trees. Vanilla grows on the orchid vines. Cacao grows in the shade below.

It arrives under a mist of vanilla and cacao, which is the closest we can get to the actual weather up there.

The Tongass is the largest temperate rainforest in North America, seventeen million acres of spruce and cedar and rain along the Alaskan panhandle. It gets more water in a year than Marfa gets in a decade.

We torch the cedar tab right before it goes in the glass. It smells like a forest floor after rain, which is the entire experience of Southeast Alaska.

In the rainforests of Southeast Asia, the year does not have four seasons. It has two. There is the dry, and then there is the monsoon, when the sky opens for months and the jungle drinks.

Long, cold, and satisfying.

Palo santo means holy wood. The tree grows in the dry tropical forests of Ecuador and Peru, in the country between desert and rainforest, and it keeps its secret until after it dies. Cut a living tree and you get nothing. Almost all of it is still gathered from trees that fell on their own.

While your drink is stirred, the glass sits inverted over a smoldering stick of it. Designed by one of our original bartenders, Taylor, it's one of the longest running items on our menu. The staple people have associated with Otherside for years.

Everyone thinks they know a margarita. The version here turns on one bottle: a blood orange liqueur made in small runs by Matchbook Distilling on the North Fork of Long Island, from actual blood oranges.

The most ordered drink in the building.