Cantarito (vessel)
A small unglazed clay jug from Jalisco used to serve a tequila highball; the vessel's porous walls give the drink an earthy mineral character and lend it the cocktail's name.
The cantarito ("little jug") is a small unglazed clay jug, traditionally thrown in the Tonalá and Tlaquepaque pottery towns east of Guadalajara and fired at low temperature. The vessel is the eponymous serving piece for the Jaliscan tequila highball of the same name, a long drink built on blanco tequila, three citruses (lime, orange, grapefruit), grapefruit soda, and a salted rim. Because the clay is unglazed, its walls remain slightly porous; the drink picks up a faint earthy-mineral note over the time it is served, and the cantarito itself stays cool by surface evaporation in the way a botijo does. The cocktail is documented in the cocktails chapter; this entry is the vessel itself.
In Jalisco the cantarito is a fixture at the charreada, at small-town fairs, and at the cantinas of Tequila and Amatitán, where vendors will fill a fresh jug to order for between thirty and eighty pesos. The clay's contribution to the drink is real but not theatrical: a serious cantarito served in a glass tumbler still works as a cocktail, but it loses the mineral lift and the cold-by-evaporation pleasure that the unglazed jug gives. The vessel's craft tradition, alongside the caballito, the jícara, and the veladora, sits in the broader Mexican drinking-vessel taxonomy walked in the culture chapter.