The 9th Wonder

The 9th Wonder is bartender Erick Castro's tequila take on the Last Word: four equal pours, shaken hard and served up. Where the 1916 original leans on gin, green Chartreuse, and maraschino, Castro swaps in blanco tequila, the dry poblano heat of Ancho Reyes, and the soft chocolate of crème de cacao - with lime left in place as the throughline. The result reads like mole in a coupe: warm, gently spiced, just sweet enough, and far more balanced than the ingredient list would suggest. Castro, a long-standing equal-parts evangelist and host of the Bartender at Large podcast, built it on the same idea that makes the Last Word work - proportion does the heavy lifting.

Where It Came From

The Last Word is a template as much as a drink - gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino, and lime in four matching pours - and bartenders have been swapping parts in and out of that frame for a century. The 9th Wonder is one of the tidier riffs: keep the equal-parts skeleton and the lime, then rebuild the spirit and both liqueurs around tequila. A firm origin date isn't well documented, and we won't invent one; Castro circulated the drink through his equal-parts material on the Bartender at Large podcast. The reasoning, though, is plainly his - he has long argued that the whole appeal of the genre is balance between the liqueurs, not any single hero ingredient.

The Spec

Four ingredients, three-quarters of an ounce each, shaken over ice and strained up. Blanco tequila is the spine; Ancho Reyes, a dry ancho-chile liqueur, takes Chartreuse's seat with a smolder of poblano instead of Alpine herbs; crème de cacao stands in for maraschino with chocolate; and fresh lime keeps the whole thing honest. Nothing is sweetened beyond the liqueurs themselves.

Why Ancho Reyes, Not Chartreuse

Ancho Reyes is built on dried poblano (ancho) chiles macerated in cane spirit, and at 40% ABV it lands as dry and structural rather than sweet - which is exactly why it can carry a full quarter of the glass. It brings the herbal-spice complexity that green Chartreuse gives the Last Word, but warm and earthy where Chartreuse is bright and piney. The heat is a slow background glow, not a sting.

The Chocolate Question

Crème de cacao is the part that makes people skeptical, and the part that makes the drink. Reach for a white crème de cacao if you have it - it keeps the colour clean and the chocolate as scent more than sugar. At 3/4 oz it doesn't read as a dessert; it rounds the chile's edge and ties the tequila's agave to the cocoa, the way mole marries chocolate to peppers.

Shaken, Because of the Lime

Anything with a full measure of citrus gets shaken, not stirred - you want the aeration and the hard chill that a shake delivers, and the lime needs both. Ten to twelve seconds against good ice, then a double-strain to keep shards out of the coupe. The brief froth that rises on top is the tell that you shook it long enough.

Bottom Line

The 9th Wonder is the rare modern Last Word riff that earns its place by being genuinely different rather than merely swapped: tequila and ancho and cacao point somewhere the gin original never goes, and the equal-parts math still holds. If you can keep four bottles and a lime within reach, it's one of the most reliable parlor tricks in the book - odd on paper, obvious in the glass.