join us for sips 'til siete every day from 5-7pm, with weekly changing cocktails, all for just £7.
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welcome to the pour – our monthly round-up of the three things worth your time this month. one drink, one idea, one person shaping how we all pour at El Siete.
named for the vessel it arrives in, the cantarito de barro, a hand-thrown clay jug soaked in water before serving so it sweats and keeps everything cold. no single inventor, like most of mexico’s best drinks. it started as a way for jimadores to stay cool while harvesting agave, and after the revolution it settled into its modern shape: tequila, a run of citrus, salt and grapefruit soda. usually squirt. usually drunk at the roadside somewhere in jalisco.
ours keeps the same dna. pa’todos blanco for the backbone, our house pomelo sec for depth of grapefruit, pineapple for gentle sweetness and yuzu soda for lift. still served in cantaritos de barro thrown especially for us, which is a small thing that connects the glass in your hand to everyone who drank it first.
dangerously sippable. you have been warned.
people were drinking fermented agave in mexico long before anyone worked out how to distil it. no tequila, no mezcal, just pulque, the fermented sap of the plant, and 2,000 years of it. it began in ritual and ceremony and it never really stopped.
what’s interesting isn’t the age of it, it’s the adaptability. spanish colonisation brought new ingredients and tepache followed, originally fermented from corn. then pineapple arrived, thrived in the climate, and vendors realised the wild yeast living on the skin fermented faster and more reliably than corn ever had. corn was quietly dropped.
both are still going. mexico city has pulquerías that have been pouring for centuries and street vendors with a barrel of tepache bubbling away in plain sight. the city grew, the technique moved with it.
known as ‘el rey del sur’, and to almost everyone else as don beto. he started working the fields of santa catarina minas at eleven years old, in a village widely considered one of the spiritual homes of ancestral mezcal.
he distils in olla de barro, clay pots, a far slower process that gives you earthy minerality and a softer texture. fermentation runs on wild yeast, which means it’s at the mercy of weather, humidity and whatever microorganisms are living around the palenque that week. no two batches are ever the same. runs are small, the labour is manual, and the focus is quality rather than growth.
his philosophy is patience. nothing gets rushed, the raw material gets respected, and generational knowledge gets trusted and then built on.
his name isn’t the loudest in agave and the releases are limited, so get your hands on a bottle if you see one. the papadiablo especial is one of our favourites he’s ever made.
come find us
el siete 66-70 brewer street, soho, london W1F 9UP
open 5pm-1am, monday to sunday
sips ’til siete runs daily, 5-7pm
