ARE YOU ONE of those people who hasn’t been able to drink tequila since college, if you know what I mean?

Once your brain has associated a certain aroma or flavor with throwing up, that behavioral conditioning gets very hard to overcome. In most cases, that’s evolution doing you a solid, keeping you from eating something poisonous more than once. In the case of you being an idiot at a Cinco de Mayo party on north campus, though, evolution is keeping you from enjoying an underrated product of human ingenuity.

That’s a bummer, because tequila—the go-to Cinco de Mayo bebida—deserves way more consideration than salt-and-a-lime. Is it a sipping drink? That depends on your palate, not the stuff in the bottle. But like all the culture-specific distillates, the chemistry of tequila tells a story about a relationship between people and where they live.