Tequila used to have one job: Show up, get poured into a shot glass, and make sure the rest of the night went somewhere you couldn’t entirely account for in the morning. Nobody asked questions. You took the shot, grabbed the lime, made a face and kept moving.
That was then.
Somewhere in the last decade, tequila reinvented itself with the kind of quiet ambition usually reserved for people who leave Indianapolis, do something interesting on either coast, then move back to open a restaurant on Mass Ave. The bottles got heavier. The prices climbed. And suddenly everyone was talking about agave like they’d always been talking about agave. “This is a nice reposado,” “You can taste the barrel.” Sure. Absolutely we can.
To be fair, some tequila earns the attention. Good tequila is smooth and considered, something you actually want to linger over rather than survive. And Indiana has caught up fast. The back bars at places like Tinker Street, Verde, and Livery aren’t stocked the way they were ten years ago. Someone did the work.
What’s strange is the speed of it. One day tequila was living in the back of someone’s freezer in Broad Ripple next to a half-empty bottle of bad decisions. The next, it was behind the bar with ambient lighting, a backstory, and a price point that made you do a quick mental check before ordering. You don’t just order it now. You choose it. There’s a pause, maybe even a brief exchange with the bartender, as if the stakes have been quietly renegotiated.
Let’s not pretend, though, that most of us encountered tequila for the first time in anything resembling a refined setting. The introduction was probably louder than that, later than that, somewhere in Broad Ripple Village or on an IU gameday with worse judgment all around. Tequila didn’t change who we were. It waited for us to catch up.
Now it occupies a strange and comfortable middle distance. Still social. Still capable of surprises. Still very much at home in the Midwest, just dressed considerably better than it used to be.
Which, if we’re being honest, describes a lot of us too.