The objective of this session was to give attendees some things they could say to their customers to encourage them to drink mezcal and other agave spirits. As a 101 session, we’re meant to cover the basics of mezcal. But the truth is, this is such a unique spirit that even the basics are complex. So what I attempted to do is to define some things – and dispel some falsehoods — about mezcal through a tasting of eight neat spirits and two cocktails.

2. The purpose
The objective of this session was to give attendees some things
they could say to their customers to encourage them to drink
mezcal and other agave spirits. As a 101 session, we’re meant to
cover the basics of mezcal. But the truth is, this is such a unique
spirit that even the basics are complex. So what I attempted to
do is to define some things – and dispel some falsehoods —
about mezcal through a tasting of eight neat spirits
and two cocktails.

4. I don’t claim to be an expert in mezcal. In fact, I’m not even sure
there is such a person. The people I know who know the most
about agave spirits are the people who make them, and they
often tell me that they are still learning. They may be expert in
what they do, but there is not a lot of communication between
communities, so they are often surprised when they hear about
or travel to another community making these spirits.

5. The spot I occupy in the world of agave spirits is this: I run a
nonprofit called SACRED. We are trying to improve quality of life
in the rural Mexican communities where these spirits are made.
I’ve been working in the field of nonprofits since 1999. After a
trip to Oaxaca in 2008, I became fascinated with how these
spirits are made; by the people who make these spirits; and by
the potential impact these people could have on the
development of solutions to the problems that challenge
the human species.
More about that later. For now, let’s drink...

6. One way to drink agave spirits neat:
First, pour the spirit in a wide-mouth vessel — ideally, something that is wider at the top than
the bottom. These are high-alcohol spirits, so if you pour them in a vessel with a narrow top, the
evaporating alcohol will gather at the mouth and blow out like a cannon from the mouth. A
wide-mouth vessel allows the evaporating alcohol to instead waft out around you.
It’s like a hug, rather than a punch.
Now pick up the vessel and smell the spirit. Then set the vessel down, pop your finger into the
liquid, and rub the liquid into one of your palms. Rub your palms together, and then cup your
hands around your nose and mouth, and smell it that way.
What you’ve done is evaporated much of the alcohol, so that you are left with the smell of the
caramelized sugars of the agave that was used to make the spirit. If you’d been at the
palenque — the home distillery — where this was made, on the day that the agave was
taken out of the oven, it would have smelled like what you are smelling on your hands.

7. Now drop your tongue into the spirit. Not really a sip — just poke your tongue in, then run your
tongue along the roof of your mouth and behind your teeth, kind of like you’re kissing yourself.
What you’re doing is clearing your palate.
Next take a half a sip — the smallest sip you’ve ever taken of anything — and leave it on your
tongue to the count of five before swallowing.
All alcohol starts life as sugar. The sugars that are used to make wine come, of course, from
grapes, and those grapes took a maximum of four months to reach maturity. Whiskey and beer,
they’re made from sugars that come from grains that took six months to reach maturity. And
while there are some varietals of cane that take a year or more to reach maturity, most rum is
made from six-month-old cane.
Agave, on the other hand, takes at least four years to reach maturity, and some varietals can
take more than 20 years. So, what’s the difference between four-month-old sugars
and 20-year-old sugars...?

8. Truthfully, there is no difference between four-month-old sugars and 20-year-old sugars.
Basically, it’s all fructose and glucose. But there are all these other molecular components that
develop in the sugar source that produce flavors and aromas. And where are you going to find
more of them — in the four-month-old grapes or in the 20-year-old agave?
For this reason, I would contend that well-made agave spirits are more complex — have more
flavors and aromas — than anything else you drink. That can be overwhelming to your palate. So
this second sip — the half-sip you hold on your tongue to the count of five — is meant to
introduce your palate to these complexities. It’s not really until your third sip — which should
also be a half-sip, held on your tongue to the count of five — that you’ll start to
truly taste the spirit.
And this is the only way I drink these spirits: small sips, held on the tongue for five seconds. If
the spirit is hot when I swallow, I’ll hold the next sip — a smaller sip — on my tongue longer. In
my experience, the smaller the sip, the bigger the flavor.

10. What is Mezcal?
Mezcal is a spirit distilled from fermented agave that has been
certified as mezcal by the CRM — a non-governmental
regulatory body. Some people will tell you that all tequilas are
mezcal, but not all mezcals are tequila. While that used to be
true, that ceased to be the case when the Mexican government
took possession of the word “mezcal” and made it a certified
product — just as tequila is, just as champagne is. Your agave
spirit can be certified as mezcal, or it can be certified as tequila.
It cannot be certified as both, regardless of what
Sammy Hagar may have told you.

11. This first mezcal is from La Luna. It is their Tequilana expression,
which is just entering the market now. It is made by Edgar Perez
and Sergio Cruz in Indaparapeo, Michoacan. So, immediately it’s
interesting because it’s made in Michoacan, whereas something
like 90% of mezcals available in the USA
are made in Oaxaca.
Edgar and Sergio start with Blue Weber agave — also interesting
because that is the same agave used to make tequila. It is, in
fact, the only agave you can use to make tequila. But while most
tequila is made in a relatively industrial manner, this mezcal is
made in a rustic fashion...

12. Edgar and Sergio roast their Blue Weber agave underground in a
stone-lined earthen oven — literally buried underground. They
mill the roasted agave by hand using axes and wooden mallets,
and then ferment it in open-air wooden barrels, allowing the
natural yeasts from the plants surrounding their vinata*
to drive fermentation.
The fermented agave is then distilled in a wood-fired copper pot
still — what is called a Tarascan or Filipino still.

13. But that rustic, handmade style of making mezcal can be
misleading. When we hear the word “mezcal,” we picture
exactly that type of process that Edgar and Sergio are using.
And while much mezcal is made that way, it would be inaccurate
to say that mezcal is a handmade spirit.
Because mezcal can be made in exactly the same
industrial process that is used to make tequila....

15. Zignum is an industrially made product. They shred uncooked
agave, and then use a diffusor to separate the starches from
those agave fibers. The diffusor blasts the agave with hot water
to achieve that separation. Some diffusors also use
sulfuric acid — I have no idea if Zignum does.
The water/sugar mixture is then moved to an autoclave — kind
of like a large pressure cooker — to convert the starches to
fermentable sugars. The sugar water is then moved to closed
steel tanks and yeast is added to instigate the fermentation.
That fermented liquid is then distilled in industrial column stills.

16. A couple of years ago, I would have told you that it was “wrong”
to make mezcal this way. But I’ve grown up. If it’s wrong to make
mezcal this way, is it also wrong to make hot dogs
in an industrial manner? Bread? Pasta?
I’ll take bartenders to Mexico to see where heirloom agave
spirits are made, and they’ll get angry about producers like
Zignum as they see them pouring samples at stalls around the
markets — at the same time those same bartenders are drinking
their Tecates. If it’s wrong for Zignum to make industral mezcal,
why is it not wrong for Tecate to make industrial beer?

17. The vast majority of what I consume is made industrially. I’m
guessing that’s true for you, too. And while I usually prefer the
taste of handmade foods and drinks, I will happily crush a
Vienna Beef hot dog, thank you very much.
Having said that, I’ve never tasted an industrial mezcal that I
liked. I’ve never tasted one that I thought was bad — I usually
find them uninteresting.
But, having said that, I’m not arrogant enough to think that my
palate is the “right” palate. In fact, a couple attending this
Mezcal 101 session told me after that they thought the Zignum
was the most palatable of what I served.

18. As interest in mezcal continues to grow, there will be demand
for more mezcal, and that’s going to stress the resources
needed — human and plant — to make the spirits. I believe an
industrial version could well protect those resources and
ultimately is more sustainable during such expansion.
Zignum’s process maximizes the sugars that are harvested from
the agaves in a way that the handcrafted process cannot. They
also have industrial methods for cleaning the byproducts of
fermentation and distillation, making them a relatively clean
factory. And they donate a lot of money to communities of need
and to Oaxacan arts. I may not like to drink their spirits, but I like
much of what they do.

20. On the issue of sustainability — or, more accurately, best
practices* — here are two more producers who have
interesting approaches.
Sombra takes the byproducts of their production — acidic
liquids and spent agave fibers — and makes adobe bricks of
them. Those bricks have been used to build homes for people in
need in Oaxaca. And their production is energy efficient. They
literally use no electricity, powering everything with energy
generated by solar panels.

21. Don Amado makes similar use of their byproducts, but I believe
the more important aspect of their best practices is their
protection of the family that makes their mezcal.
The family — like many — was using wood to fire their stills. As
the founders of Don Amado watched family members die from
lung and throat cancer, they realized that the loss of trees was
far from the worst consequence of this practice. So they rigged
the indoor stills with gas fire, rather than wood.
And, really, if we’re talking about sustainability ... what’s more
important to protect than the men and women who
make these spirits?

23. Women Can’t Make Mezcal
That’s what I’ve been told, on many trips to Oaxaca, by both
men and women. But here’s a line of artisanal mezcals that are
made by matriarch Margarita Blass. She uses a variety of agaves
at her palenque in Santiago Matatlan, Oaxaca.
Margarita roasts her agave in a stone-lined earthen oven; mills
those agave with a horse-drawn stone wheel; ferments in open-
air wooden barrels, and distills in wood-fired copper pot stills.
She has developed a line that demonstrates that a woman can
make mezcal just as delicious as any man.

25. You Should Limit Your Consumption of Wild Agaves
There are a number of people in the industry — many of whom
are my friends — who advocate limiting the consumption of
mezcal and other agave spirits made with wild-grown agave
(often labeled as silvestre). Their theory is that we will drink
these wild agave out of existence.
While I am all in favor of their objective — to preserve the many
varietals of agave and to maintain a healthy population of agave
in the wild — I don’t think the best strategy for doing that is to
limit the consumption of wild agave. I think the opposite.

26. As more and more multi-national companies get into the mezcal
business, agave is becoming harder to access in specific
communities. These large companies are protecting their
investments by securing rights to agave, contracting for futures
as well as buying farms outright — which is what you have to do
with a commodity that takes so long to reach maturity.
That leaves the small, independent producers with less access
to agave. At this stage, if they don’t have their own agave farms,
their access may be limited to wild agave in their communities.

27. Wild agave rarely grows in clusters of sufficient size that larger
companies would be able to make use of them. And they
generally are growing in communities where they are regarded
as the property of the community. So by default, they can
become the source material for the families who have been
using handcrafted methods for multiple generations.
If we stop drinking these agaves, they lose value. These small
producers won’t receive the money they need in order to buy
land and plant their own agave. So I contend that you should
drink the spirits made from wild agave — and pay top dollar for
them, especially when buying direct from these producers.

28. Aquilino Garcia Lopez is one of the four maestro mezcaleros
from whom Vago sources their mezcal. The spirit we poured at
this tasting was made from espadin agave that Aquilino farmed
on his own land. But he also makes a number of expressions
using wild-grown agave — and they are among my favorites. I
drink them often, and I pay what they cost, which is significantly
more than the espadin expression.

30. The One Made with Chicken
People hear about the “pechuga” mezcal and go looking for the
“one made with chicken.” And there’s often confusion with what
that means. So here, in a nutshell, is one explanation:
This is Eduardo Angeles — Lalo to his friends. He is a fifth-
generation maestro mezcalero in Santa Catarina Minas, Oaxaca.
He makes his mezcal by roasting his agave in a stone-lined
earthen oven, leaving it underground to cook for five to seven
days. He mills the agave by hand using wooden mallets;
ferments open-air in wooden barrels; distills in wood-fired
clay pot stills.

31. Normally, Lalo would stop the process after two distillations.
When he’s making pechuga, he throws the spirit back in the still
for a third distillation. He adds fruits ... bananas, plums, apples,
and more ... spices like cinnamon ... almonds ... rice ... and
a raw chicken breast.
Distillation is the separation of alcohol from water. Alcohol has a
boiling point of 173 degrees, water 212. So the temperature
in the still will be in that range, with all of those ingredients
simmering in the roughly 50% ABV spirit. The alcohol boils
into a vapor and leaves the still, carrying the flavors of
those ingredients with it.

33. You Shouldn’t Age Mezcal in Wood
That’s what some folks will tell you. Hell, that’s what I would
have told you a couple years ago. Age it in wood, and you’re
burying the flavor of the agave, the plant that took (in some
cases) fifteen years to reach maturity.
And while there is no doubt that the wood does change the
flavor ... and of course, that’s why you do it ... well, it’s kind of
hypocritical to say on the one hand that you like a pechuga, but
that you don’t believe mezcal should be barrel aged. If you don’t
think the chicken and fruit are burying the mezcal, you’re not
drinking closely enough.

34. Some people will claim that the pechuga is a tradition and that
barrel-aging mezcal is not. Even if you ignore the logic and
evidence that contradicts that, you’re left to ask exactly how
much time is required before an action becomes a tradition —
because I remember that first bottle of Monte Alban I had in the
late 1980s as being wood-aged. Or at least yellow. So if 30+
years doesn’t now make it tradition, how much more time
do we need?
And while we’re talking about the anejo expression of Lagrimas
de Dolores’ cenizo mezcal (we are talking about that, right?), I
think we should also address...

35. You Can’t Be a First-Generation Mezcalero
Some people would claim that if you don’t come from a family
of mezcaleros, you have no business making mezcal. Now ... this
is Fabiola Avila, and you’re correct when you say she isn’t a
mezcalero. She’s a mezcalera. And she’s a chemical engineer,
and first-generation mezcal producer. She produces
phenomenal spirits. If you suggest that she can’t, because she
wasn’t trained from youth by an older relative, I’d suggest you
try any of the expressions she makes for Lagrimas De Dolores.
If, on the other hand, you suggest she shouldn’t,
because she is disrupting a tradition...

36. It’s rare that I meet any mezcaleros who claim to be more than
fifth generation. I think seventh-generation is the longest I’ve
heard. And if you run that math, that seventh-generation
mezcalero is tracing his heritage back a maximum of 210 years.
That’s a long time, 210 years. But we know that the tradition of
making mezcal goes back at least 500 years, to the Spanish
arrival. Likely even before their arrival. Regardless, if you’re
going to make the lineage argument, where are you drawing the
cut-off line? Should the only people who get to make mezcal be
the ones who are directly related to the blood line of the
first person who distilled fermented agave?

37. Basically the people who make this argument are drawing an
arbitrary line, and in most cases, not coincidentally, they draw
themselves on the profitable side of that line.
To be clear, I see great value in the multi-generational wisdom
and skills development of these families who have been making
agave spirits in a traditional way for multiple generations. But
(a) that doesn’t mean that someone else can’t make perfectly
delicious mezcal, either using the same or similar methods, or
completely different methods, and (b) just being born into one
of these families doesn’t mean you can make delicious mezcal
— or, for that matter, that you’ve benefited from the multi-
generational wisdom. Wisdom isn’t a birthright.

38. Anyway, having said all that, this eighth taste is
Lagrimas De Dolores’ Mezcal Anejo. It was made by first-
generation maestra mezcalera Fabiola Avila in Durango.
Fabiola roasts her cenizo agave in a stone-lined earthen oven;
mills it using a machine; ferments it in open-air barrels;
distills in copper stills; and ages in fresh oak barrels.

40. This brings us to mezcal cocktails. As with the barrel-aged
mezcals, a couple years ago I would have said that these spirits
are too precious to be buried in cocktails. But I was just a dumb
kid a couple years ago. First, just as great ingredients can be
used to make great dishes, great spirits can be used to make
great cocktails — it’s just a matter of respecting your
ingredients. Second, the vast majority of the consuming public
drinks cocktails, not neat spirits — you have to meet people
where they are, not where you want them to be.
Having said that, when you serve a mezcal cocktail, I hope you’ll
pour your customer a small taste of the mezcal you used, to
help them understand what it brings to the cocktail.

41. I think, to preserve the tradition of hand-made agave spirits, we
have to get more people drinking those small-batch expressions,
and paying more money for them. And most people don’t want
to buy $40 cocktails. So...
Anyway, the key differentiator between mezcal cocktails and
other cocktails is that the range of flavors of different mezcals is
much more broad than other spirits. The flavors of whiskeys
tend to live within a relatively well-defined box. Mezcals can be
worlds apart, so you can’t just trade out one brand for another.

42. To illustrate this point, Michael Rubel of Estereo made two
cocktails the exact same way, with the only difference being the
mezcal. One version was made with Los Nahuales’ Espadin, the
other with La Luna’s Cupreata. Both delicious — because
Michael doesn’t make any drink less than delicious —
but both very different.
Michael’s recipe for that cocktail is one of seven available at
sacredagave.org/cocktails.png, the others borrowed (with
permission) from Emma Janzen’s fine book, Mezcal.

44. At this point, having discussed some basics of mezcal, I want to circle back around to the
foundation of it all: the myth that mezcal is made by hand, by multi-generational mezcaleros,
using the exact same pre-industrial process that was used in the 16th century.
Because that myth is borne from a truth.
Mexico is populated with men and women who use their five senses — instead of
thermometers and dials — to determine when the earthen oven is hot enough to begin roasting
their agave. They take hours or days milling the agave by hand or with a stone wheel, rather
than accomplishing the job in minutes using wood chippers or other machines.
They ferment the agave in open-air vessels, rather than closed systems, leaving the ferment
susceptible to the wild acetic acid bacteria that wants to consume the alcohol and convert it
into vinegar — requiring them to monitor the ferment closely and then distill through
completion, over a 24- to 48-hour period.

45. The men and women who use these inefficient methods, they’re not unsophisticated.
And while they’re not rich, they could certainly afford the modern tools used for fermentation
and distillation. In fact, the Mexican government passed out stainless-steel, closed-fermentation
vessels years back. A number of the people I know have them.
They use them instead to store grain.
So why do they do things the hard way?
It would be inaccurate to suggest they all do it for the same reason, but the reason that I see
often — and that compels me to do what I do at SACRED — is because they have a different
outlook on life than “we” do in mainstream USA. The world I live in is centered around
efficiency: How can I do something more easily. The world I see in rural Mexico is
unconcerned with how to get something done efficiently — the people I am drawn to
instead are focused on how to get a better result.

46. I think that point of view — one that values the end result over the cost of time —
can be an important one to us as a species.
What we do, the reason we have developed as a species, is because we solve problems.
And the way we solve problems in “mainstream humanity” sometimes creates bigger problems.
As a child growing up in the 1970s, I heard “zero population growth” a lot. That conversation
died with the development of factory farming. And now we’re seeing how factory farming is
destroying our waterways.
Compare that to what Eduardo Angeles did in Santa Catarina Minas, Oaxaca. Lalo had two
problems: Every six or seven years, they get El Nino rains, which would cause mud slides in his
community; every eight or nine years, there would be drought, which would disrupt farming,
forcing all the men working those jobs to leave town to make money elsewhere.
Lalo convinced the women in town to volunteer for a couple weeks, building stone walls up and
down the mountains surrounding the community. Rain water would pool at those walls,
enriching the soil, and now grass and trees grow where they hadn’t in decades.
So ... no more mud slides.

47. And the water that does filter through the stone walls?
It makes its way to natural ravines that the men in town capped by building dams.
In 2016, Minas only experienced eight days of rain. But those reservoirs were more than enough
to keep the community farming. Nobody had to leave for work — they had work right at home.
Roughly the same time, California was predicting El Nino rains that were expected to cause the
same devastating mud slides as Minas had experienced. A reporter on NPR was interviewing an
official from California state government about the problem, and the reporter asked if there
might at least be a silver lining in that the rains could help end the drought that the state had
been experiencing for years. “No,” she was told. “There is no way to capture those rains.”

48. I believe there’s great value in these rural Mexican communities. Yes, that value is expressed in
these agave spirits. But as with Lalo’s water reservoirs, the value can also be expressed in
solutions to the problems that we face as a species.
I think the solutions to problems like water insecurity, food insecurity, and climate change are
buried in the imaginations of the children in these communities, and specifically in these
families that have been developing multi-generational wisdom — who have maintained an
inefficient course that favors results over everything else.
I want to see these families become “rock stars” — become highly valued for their approach to
life. And I think these spirits can be the thing that catches our global attention and becomes the
platform for a discussion about this valuable approach to solutions.
But that won’t happen if these families are unable to access the source material for their spirits.

49. Again, I don’t begrudge the multi-national companies securing their investments by buying up
the agave farms around Oaxaca. It makes economic sense. But at the same time, we need to
support these small producers — these families who are what we think of when we think of
“mezcal,” but who have been locked out of using that word either because
they can’t afford the cost of certification or because they live in an area
that isn’t allowed to certify. We need to support them in a way
that ensures they can continue to access agave.
I believe the agave is the key to their survival, and that
the key to solving critical problems facing humanity is their approach to problems.
I don’t believe the solution is to “fight” the multi-national liquor companies, or the large mezcal
brands. Frankly, I think without their advertising dollars and distribution mechanisms, it would
be impossible to make these small producers “rock stars” and bring their voice into the larger
conversation. I think they are part of the strategy.

50. As these large brands build a market for “mezcal,” they also create an opportunity for “rock
stars” of “mezcal.” That’s these small producers, who are doing things in the way that the public
imagines all mezcal is made. And while it would be a lot easier to make them the “rock stars” of
mezcal if they were actually allowed to call their agave spirits “mezcal,” I also think there’s a
value to presenting their situation as it is. We all love underdogs.
We just have to make sure these underdogs can access agave, and in the short term, I think
that means giving them a lot of money. In the long term, it means helping them purchase land
on which they can plant agave.
If you want to directly support these families, head down to Mexico. Email lou@sacredagave.org
for GPS coordinates and information about where you can stay and how you can access rental
cars or guides.