3 spicy margarita recipes for drinking in warmer weather

There are cocktail bars today that seem almost church-like — hallowed spaces where the faithful come to taste and engage in acts of exegesis, analyzing every nuance and extolling how spirit and bitters come together in the glass.

The margarita is not a drink of such bars.

Like most cocktails, the margarita — a combination of tequila, lime and triple sec that has been around since at least the 1930s, with a roster of claimants to its invention — has been endlessly upgraded and complicated by the modern craft cocktail movement. And there are serious and sublime agave spirit bars, in Mexico and domestically, that treat agave spirits, tequila and especially mezcal, as the complex and varied spirits they are.