I ran across the news that Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville empire will be reclaiming the largest margarita title soon. After looking at the colossal specs of this thing, I wondered what a proper margarita would look like at the same scale. Let’s dive into the recipe for the biggest margarita in the world.

The Lucky Rita serves 181,333

• 2,125 gallons of Margaritaville Gold Tequila
• 708 gallons of Triple Sec
• 5,667 gallons of Margaritaville Margarita Mix and Lemon-X sour mix
• 22,667 Lime Wedges

Serve over 9 days. October 14th to October 23rd coinciding with the 7th annual Margaritaville street party.

Now, I’m no gigantic margarita expert, but that recipe looks like a tanker truck full of liquid crap. The numbers work out to a vat of 8500 gallons, with .046 gallons (or 5.9oz) of Lucky Rita per drink (not counting ice dilution of course.) While the press release doesn’t get into the nitty gritty of making the drink, I’m guessing they are mixing all of the liquid together and then just adding ice when they serve the drinks. However they serve it, it will still taste like a syrupy cup o’ crap with a ratio of 2:1, mixer to spirits.

That said, while I despise the margaritas pumped out by Jimmy’s camp, I still want to be that guy. He makes millions off of frozen jalapeno poppers and coconut shrimp. Yes. I will make disgusting drinks for millions of dollars.

Just to highlight different between how we make our drinks, let’s just scale up a proper margarita to serve 181,333.

Using the margarita recipe of

• 2oz tequila
• 1.33oz Cointreau
• .66oz lime juice

we can figure out exactly how to supply almost the entire city of Tacoma (population 198,397) with margaritas.

The Tacoma Rita serves 181,333

• 4,248 gallons of tequila
• 2,832 gallons of Cointreau
• 1,416 gallons of lime juice
• 181,333 lime wedges (because everything drink should have a garnish and I don’t like to half ass things like they did with the Lucky Rita)

There you have it folks, a proper margarita at scale.

Note: I just realized that the way I calculated the servings of the Tacoma Rita is off. It would actually serve more than 181,333. So that means the city of Fife, WA is invited too. Sorry I don’t feel like going back and changing my numbers.