An Unexpected Outing
I’ll probably be back in an hour or so, I told Jordan, innocently unaware of just how wrong I was.
One of the things that I wanted to do while in Oaxaca was learn about, and subsequently write about, mezcal. Mezcal is Mexico’s hot new centuries-old drink. Through a friend of a friend, I had been e-introduced to Eber Villalobos, the founder of Ánimas mezcal. Eber had agreed to an interview and to let me visit his mezcal distillery.
As a homebrewer with twenty years of brewing under the belt, I’m a big nerd when it comes to fermentation and I quickly grew fascinated with mezcal. I liken mezcal to whiskey. It’s made through the same basic distillation process and although the flavor profiles found in mezcal differ markedly from those of whiskeys, a similar art is employed in their refinement. Much like whiskey, there is good mezcal, great mezcal and shit mezcal. The bad can be downright revolting, the average stuff can give you a pleasant buzz without offering much flavor one way or the other and the great stuff can be truly heavenly, moving you through realms of flavor ecstasy usually associated with rare wines and eye-poppingly expensive single malts.
The exact origin of mezcal is a matter of debate. The drink is derived from various species of agave and fermented agave drinks have been made by indigenous people here for millennia. The mezcal that arrives bottled on bar and restaurant shelves today, however, is made using materials and techniques that were almost certainly introduced by the Spanish during their conquest of Mexico.
I met Eber on on a corner across from the Templo de Santo Domingo and we took a cab a short distance to where his friend Gabriel was to pick us up and drive us out to the palenque, or distillery, which he said was actually in the nearby town of Matatlán.
Mezcal has gotten big recently. Not only can it be found in most bars in Mexico, but a quick online search turns up dozens of blog posts and news articles, many tripping over themselves in a rush to be the first to open drinkers’ eyes to the new and exciting world of mezcal.
Hipsters Strike Gold
The current boom started with the hipsters, Eber said. Chilango hipsters would come to Oaxaca for a cheap vacation, bringing with them a desire to experience “authentic” Oaxaca in all its rustic glory. Some of these chilangos owned or worked in bars and started to open supply lines between Oaxacan palenqueros and the hip young bars of Colonias Condessa, Roma and Coyoacán, offering tastes of an “authentic” Oaxacan experience to their clientele. With strong ties and easy travel between Mexico City and other large cities in the US, mezcal migrated northwards.
While waiting for Gabriel, Eber announced that we would attend a fiesta at a neighboring palenque that evening, involving more mezcaleros, as the makers of mezcal are called here.
At this point I realized that I was in for much more than I had expected and that Jordan and I would not be on speaking terms if she was left out.
Mind if I invite my wife, I asked Eber.
Hágale, he replied enthusiastically.
Several frantic texts and a hurried cab ride later, Jordan met us in time to jump into Gabriel’s car and hit the road towards Matatlán. Almost 45 minutes later, we arrived at the Dainzu palenque. Dainzu means “magüey hill” in zapotec, magüey being the Mexican term for the agaves from which mezcal can be distilled.
Dainzu
Dainzu is downright bucolic. The site consists of a small and simple wooden storefront, from which Leoncio Santiago and his wife Octavia sell a few of their bottles, some baked goods and a collection of colorful mezcal-themed artesanias. Around the side of the palenque lay scattered farm machinery, rusty hand tools and various other pieces of Leoncio’s trade.
Standing out from all the rest was the great magüey pit. Roughly a ton and a half of magüey hearts, or piñas, reposed inside the pit, slowly roasting over a bed of coals. The slow cooking process converted the long and indigestible starches of the piñas into smaller, simpler sugars that yeast could ferment into alcohol. The aroma smelled like a sightly sweet campfire with notes of tree bark and maple syrup, despite the lack of either of those two ingredients.
Eber cut a slice out of one of the piñas and offered it to Jordan and I to taste. I enjoyed its sweet smokey flavor, somewhat like carmelized sugarcane. Although soft and chewy, it was still too fibrous to really eat, so we sucked the sugar from it and spat out the remaining sticky pulp.
Leoncio proved an enthusiastic host. He poured us samples of his mezcales, some of which could easily hold their own against any high-quality single malt out there. He grew several varieties of maguey and we liberally sampled espadín, cuixe, madre cuixe, tepeztate and tobalá, among others.
Leoncio demonstrated how he calculated the alcohol content of his mezcales, using a bamboo mouth pipette and a small hemispherical gourd cup called a jícara, rather than by a hydrometer, as I would have expected. To measure the alcohol content, he merely drew a measure of mezcal into the bamboo pole, let it fall into the jícara and observed the resulting bubbles at the surface. By how many formed, their sizes and how long they persisted, he claimed to be able to discern the liquid’s alcohol content to within less than 1% of a hydrometer reading. We didn’t have a hydrometer handy to put this to the test, so I’ll have to take his word for it. Eber told us that this method is actually employed by most mezcaleros, including those working for large-scale operations. I’ll assume that it is sufficiently accurate.
Every good drink deserves a good snack and so we munched between sips. TLeoncio offered chapulines and gusanos. Chapulines are a Oaxacan tradition: grasshoppers fried in oil with spices, usually chiles, until they are crunchy and have absorbed the flavors of their seasoning. Well-seasoned chapulines taste great, although I still find it best not to contemplate them too closely while eating them. The gusanos, specifically in this case, gusanos de magüey, are the infamous tequila worms. Actually moth larvae, these critters burrow into magüey plants and ruin them for use in making pulque (more on that later) and mezcal. As a past measure of symbolic revenge, some magüey farmers and mezcaleros drowned the larvae in their product. Eating the worm became a sometimes-but-not-really-that-often-invoked challenge after a few too many copitas of mezcal and the idea become popularized among certain circles in the US, from where the term “tequila worm” comes from. Why tequila, specifically? Tequila is a type of mezcal made from a certain blue agave that grows in Tequila, Mexico. Hence the name. It’s the same as champagne in that respect. You can transplant grapes from Champagne, France to Peoria, Illinois, and no matter how well it plays, you still can’t call anything you make from those grapes “champagne”. If you do, you’re legally considered a dickhead.
Leoncio’s gusanos were a pinkish red and had an indistinct, slightly salty flavor. Jordan found their taste disagreeable, I felt that they lacked enough flavor in any direction to merit eating many of them. The chapulines were another matter. Smoky and spicy with slivers of dried chile de árbol, they provided perfect accompaniment to some truly excellent mezcal.
Leoncio and Eber walked us through their operation, from the harvesting and slow cooking of the piñas, to the distillation of the spirit in copper vessels. They complained that tequileros were poaching Oaxacan agaves of other species to make up for an ongoing shortage in blue agaves. Many producers will dilute their mezcal with sugar to make a few more bottles from a limited number of plants. While generally looked down upon, the addition of sugar seems to be a fairly widespread practice (and one reason to look for the phrase “made from 100% agave” on a bottle). The supposed poaching presents another matter. Oaxacan palenqueros often view this as outright theft and another front in a long-running culture war between norteños of earopean descent and largely indigenous southerners.
Pulque
After that and a generous round of samples, we continued on towards the mezcalero fiesta. We stopped on the way for one more Oaxacan delicacy: pulque. Pulque is the fermented milk of the magüey. The milk itself is called aguamiel (water-honey, or roughly, sweet water). Unlike mezcal, or even beer, nothing has to be done to the milk to turn it into pulque. During harvest, pulqueros cut away the sharp, thick leaves of the magüey to get to the piña, into which they inject what are essentially very large straws, or reinforced mouth pipettes. Someone then sucks the aguamiel up through the straw and deposits it into a container. The aguamiel is often drunk as a soft drink by kids. Some of the aguamiel is left to sit for a few days and the yeast that is naturally found on the magüey converts it from aguamiel to pulque.
Aguamiel and pulque have some rather unique flavors. The aguamiel tasted quite sweet and had a consistency somewhere between a fruit juice and a milkshake. After the yeast converts sugar to ethanol, the resulting pulque is only slightly thinner and while still sweet, takes on a bitterer, slightly sour flavor. It’s definitely not for everyone, but I for one found it pretty pleasant, a little bit like a honey-laden sour beer.
Both aguamiel and pulque are also very cheap. I didn’t want to arrive at the fiesta empty-handed, so I ordered some pulque to share. The woman at the counter came back to say that she had no small containers available. She could either sell me pulque in plastic dixie cups or in a five liter jug. I walked out of the shop with five liters of aguamiel, figuring that there would be plenty of alcohol at the party any and I could enjoy sampling the leftover aguamiel as it became pulque.
Goat Straight From the Ground
The party turned out to be a BBQ taking place in the enclosed industrial lot of the Los Javis mezcal fábrica. In one corner of the lot, a couple tons of piñas lay slowly roasting. Nearby them was a pile of roasted piñas awaiting further processing, their dark and sticky juices oozing away from them along the ground. A door at another corner led into the barrel storage room, wherein racks of mezcal reposed in wooden barrels. The party took place just out side that door. Plastic tables had been set up and the people sitting around them feasted on BBQ chivo (goat).
The goat was delicious. A saint would lie to a beggar to avoid sharing it. We devoured it with utensils and fingers, in between sips of mezcal, while talking to the other people at our table. Around us sat a collection of mezcaleros from different families, all of whom counted many generations of the craft. A long table behind us hosted a restaurant group from Chicago, there to learn about the mezcal they planned to serve up north. Despite the widening agave shortage, we felt a palpable excitement among all present at the prospects for greater export opportunities to the US market, where many mezcal drinkers will pay high premiums to taste Mexico’s sacred beverage.
Sometime that night, we piled into Gabriel’s car for the drive back to Oaxaca. The others in the car made plans for to keep partying that night, but while our livers toiled through their long workday, our eyelids were clocking out. We threw ourselves into our beds, bellies full of mezcal, chivo and gusanos, heads full of the lore and science of Mexico’s greatest beverage.
Post Script on Ilegal Mezcal
That’s not a typo. The Ilegal mezcal brand is pure genius. I can count at least four occasions wherein an American (always an American…) tourist has grown loud(er) and excited while describing a bar or restaurant that serves “illegal mezcal”, only to find that the establishment in question serves Ilegal mezcal. This seems to play on the surprisingly frequent misunderstanding concerning mezcal’s legality. Serving mezcal is by no means illegal, although which mezcal gets served in who’s establishment seems to be subject to some political contention. I doubt that Ilegal Mezcal intended to play on this with their label. I find it more likely that their brand makes allusion to the various prohibitions that Mexico has suffered, during which people would, of course, continue making mezcal. Still, it successfully gets tourists very excited about drinking it. Hats off, Ilegal, well played.