Tia Mia

A Mexican-inspired Mai Tai that splits the base between smoky mezcal and funky Jamaican rum, creating a tropical drink with unexpected depth.

Tia Mia was created by Ivy Mix around 2010 while working at Lani Kai in Manhattan and later became a signature cocktail at Leyenda, the Latin spirits-focused bar that Mix co-owns with Julie Reiner on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Mix — who won the Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Award for American Bartender of the Year in 2015 and wrote the book Spirits of Latin America (2020) — built her cocktail practice specifically around the spirits of Latin America, and Tia Mia represents her personal synthesis of the Caribbean and Mexican traditions she studied deeply. The drink is a playful name transposition: Tia Mia reverses the vowel sounds of Mai Tai, the tiki classic created by Victor Bergeron at Trader Vic's in Oakland in 1944 from Jamaican rum, orange curaçao, orgeat, and lime juice. Mix's formula splits the rum component between Jamaican rum and mezcal, the Caribbean cane spirit and the Mexican agave spirit finding a complementary pairing whose shared earthiness and complexity connect despite their different agricultural and geographical origins. The smoke of mezcal and the funk of pot-still Jamaican rum occupy similar aromatic registers — both are products of fermentation and distillation that emphasize the character of their agricultural raw material over the neutrality of the spirit — making the combination feel like a deliberate meeting of equals.