Drink This Now: Strange Paradise at Mean Mule Distilling Co
Strange Paradise at Mean Mule // Photo by Pilsen Photo Co-op
Mean Mule Distilling Co sent me on a journey, and I emerged a changed woman.
They’re a local Crossroads distillery that specializes in a variety of American agave spirits, complete with a tasting room to drink the aforementioned American agave spirits. This is where I journeyed to Paradise.
By that, I mean Strange Paradise, a potentially polarizing $16 cocktail from the distillery’s 2026 spring menu.
It’s the creation of beverage director Amy Connor and made from a combination of Malort, Mean Mule’s GOLD aged American spirit, strega, pineapple liqueur, mostarda, lemon, lime, and demerara. The menu’s description claims, here, that “mustard and malort DO work together.”
Since I (somewhat performatively) love a shot of abhorrent, botanically bitter malort, I knew that Strange Paradise would be mine. And I can attest that the mustard and malort DID work together.
Strange Paradise at Mean Mule // Photo by Pilsen Photo Co-op
The drink arrives over ice with a pandan leaf garnish. Mine was a milky, faint yellow.
For those concerned, the malort doesn’t come on too strongly. The highlight, really, is the mostarda, an Italian condiment of fruit, sugar, and mustard oil. Combined with the rest of the drink’s more tropical ingredients, I’ll admit that the resulting flavor profile defies my immediately available spectrum of English adjectives. I’ll try my best anyway.
Every sip started with a kind of fig bar sweetness, in part thanks to the warm anise in the herbaceous strega. Then, it gave way to the sharp bite of the mostarda’s, well, capital-M-Mustard aroma. It was still somewhat sweet but existed in a separate, distinctly tangy universe from what had just preceded it. I experienced this shift over and over and over again until the glass was empty. It was a narrative arc. It was prose—
—“it was lowkey jesus in a cup,” I texted my cousin.
But if you let a story overstay its welcome, it starts to fall apart. Literally, in my case. Since I was nursing my drink, the emulsion began to break into tiny clumps. Where Strange Paradise turns mustard and malort to liquid gold, it does not do the same for semi-solid bits.
As long as you don’t repeat my mistake, you too can find lowkey Jesus in a cup.
Mean Mule Distilling Co is at 1733 Locust St, Kansas City, MO 64108.
