Best gifts for tequila and margarita lovers

Working out which one you have

You can usually settle this from one memory. Picture the last drink you saw them make or order, and check it against this:

• They order margaritas out, and make them at home

  Margarita buyer. The gift is lime, then measurement, then glassware. Anything that improves the fresh-citrus step is the highest-leverage thing you can give them.

• They have a bottle they are protective of

  Tequila buyer. They are drinking it neat or over one large cube, and a proper tasting glass is a gift they will not have bought themselves.

• They host, and there is a blender involved

  Margarita buyer, hosting variant. Buy quantity: glasses in twelves, not fours, and a press that survives forty limes in an afternoon.

• They talk about blanco, reposado and anejo

  Tequila buyer, unambiguously. Vocabulary is the tell — the words describe barrel time, which is only interesting to someone drinking it neat.

If you genuinely cannot tell, buy for the margarita drinker. The margarita gifts here are all useful to a tequila drinker on a hot afternoon; a 190 ml tasting glass is of no use whatsoever to someone who only drinks margaritas.

Why the lime is the whole gift

A margarita is tequila, lime and orange liqueur. Three ingredients means every one of them is fully exposed, and the one that varies most between a home drink and a bar drink is not the tequila. It is the lime.

Bottled lime juice is pasteurized and stabilized, which is what makes it shelf stable and what makes it taste flat. Fresh lime juice is neither. That is the single biggest difference between the drink they make and the drink they order, and the reason it is not already fixed is friction: hand-squeezing limes is unpleasant enough that people stop doing it.

A geared hand press removes the friction. Chef’n publishes a claim of 20 percent more juice than a conventional juicer from its dual-gear mechanism — that is their figure and not something we measured, but the mechanical principle is straightforward and visible in the tool. What matters for the gift is that the person who owns one squeezes limes and the person who does not, does not.

The ratio, and the cheapest way to fix it

The second thing that separates a home margarita from a good one is that nobody measures. A margarita is a ratio, and a ratio poured by eye drifts a quarter ounce at a time until the drink is either sour or syrupy and nobody can say why.

A jigger with interior markings solves it for the price of a sandwich. We compare the jigger styles properly on their own page, but the short version is that the useful ones are marked inside for intermediate measures, not just at the two rims. A plain 1 oz / 2 oz cup with no interior lines cannot pour three quarters of an ounce, and three quarters of an ounce is the measurement this drink lives on.

Glassware: quantity for one, quality for the other

The two glass picks here are not competing. They are for different people, and the numbers show it plainly.

The Libbey set is sized for the drink. A shaken drink occupies roughly five to six ounces once the ice is in, so a 9 oz glass leaves three to four ounces of clear space above the liquid — which is exactly what keeps a salted rim above the waterline instead of dissolving into the drink.

The Riedel is sized for the opposite reason. At 190 ml a standard measure fills less than a quarter of the glass, and the empty volume above it is the working part — it is where aroma collects. It also carries a designation as the official tequila glass from the Consejo Regulador del Tequila, which is a verifiable fact about the glass rather than a claim about what it does to your palate. We are not going to tell you it makes the tequila taste better; we cannot check that.

What to skip

Three things get sold constantly into this category and none of them survive the test we apply to every gift on this site — if they already own one, is this still useful?

• Novelty salt rimmers with flavored salts. The salts go stale, the tray takes cupboard space, and a saucer of salt does the same job.
• Cactus-shaped everything. It gets one laugh and a lifetime of cupboard.
• Bottled margarita mix. It is the problem the rest of this page exists to solve.

If you want the broader version of that reasoning, the things that look great and get used twice covers the whole category. And if the recipient turns out to be a stirred-drinks person after all, the Old Fashioned and Manhattan page is the one you want instead.