 | Tristan visits a mezcal distillery | |
| Tristan visits a mezcal distillery | |
What is mezcal, how do they make it and why does it taste so damn strange? All these questions and more demanded to be answered, and so last Sunday I headed out with a group of friends to visit the Mezcal Mistico distillery in Tlacolula, Oaxaca (callously leaving Tamar on her sick bed). To find out what happened, read on...
Mezcal is made from the centres of the spiney maguey plant (also known as agave) after it has matured (7-10 years old). Mezcal (and its better known counterpart, tequila) are rare in the world of fermentation in that the raw material doesn't contain sugar, only a lot of starch, which must be broken down to sugar by a slow cooking process. To do so, the distiller places a layer of mesquite wood and rocks into a large fire pit, and burns the wood till the rocks are red hot. He then puts a layer of dampened maguey husk on top of the rocks, followed by the halved maguey centres (called piñas because they look like large pineapples). Finally, the whole lot is covered with a layer of earth and left to slowly cook over 2-3 days. This cooking process is where mezcal differs from tequila (in which the maguey plants are simply pressure-cooked in large vats) and accounts for its smokey taste.
Once the starch has been converted to sugar, its time to extract the syrupy juice. The tried and tested way to do so is to use a large grinding wheel, pulled by a donkey. This mashing process produces a useless (in fermentation terms) husk and the sweet juice, which is re-absorbed by the husk, so the whole lot can then be pitch-forked in to large tuns in order to...
This is carried out by just leaving the maguey mash in a room where you've fermented before, so that there is enough yeast in the air to start the process going (or you can hurry it up by adding a bit of the liquid from another fermenting batch). Once it's going, water is added, and the whole lot is left to ferment for about a week, after which it reaches around 7 percent alcohol. The taste is now distinctly mezcal-like, although a lot weaker and yeastier. (The stuff produced is similar to the pre-hispanic drink called pulque - see below) It's also quite repulsive-looking. A layer of sodden husk and crusty yeast sits atop the murky brown liquid, while hundreds of small black flies (actually a species of mosquito that likes alcohol, nicknamed borrachos) buzz around above it.
The next step is to shove it all in to a metal cage (to get the husk out again) and to place it in a still. Fermentation is then carried out twice. The first time it reaches approx 20 percent alcohol (and less scrupulous distillers will stop here and 'dilute' it with pure alcohol) and the second it gets up to 70 percent (which you really know about when you sip it). It's then diluted down to sale strength (approx 40 percent) with distilled water, at which point it can be bottled and sold as mezcal jóven. You can also do other things with is such as stick it in oak barrels and leave it for 6 months (reposado) to a year (añejo). Or you can soak fruit in it for a couple of weeks (abocado) or add a maguey worm (con gusano). You can also add other stuff to the bottles (including scorpions) but this is just gimmickry according to Eric, the distiller and guide at Mezcal Mistico. Finally, if you want to get really weird, you can make mezcal de pechuga. Pechuga means chicken breast in Spanish, and that's exactly what it involves: when they put the mezcal in to the still for a second distillation, they also add fruit to the liquid and then suspend two cleaned plucked chickens above the liquid, along with cloth bags full of cinnamon and other herbs. The boiling mezcal vapour then passes over the chickens and extracts some of the flavour. It sounds disgusting but is actually quite pleasant: a mildly spice flavour, clearish mezcal - in fact, I am sipping one now as I write, having bought a bottle to take home.
So, the tour over (apart from seeing a smaller still that they use to make an even-purer 'triple-distilled' version) it was time to go and taste the finished product, accompanied by wedges of lime or grapefruit and sal de gusano (salt with ground chilli and ground-up maguey worm). They make a variety of mezcals at Mistico: jóven, reposado, abocado, con gusano, de pechuga and triple distilled. All of which are very palatable and a few of which won prizes at a recent mezcal fair in Oaxaca.
All of this was quite an exciting prelude to a visit to the centre of Tlacolula town, where the streets are thronged with the local cycle-taxis (called calicheos, which means 'where are you going to?' in Zapotec), and on to the famous Sunday market where they sell all sorts of things including chillis metates to grind your tortilla flour, and the odd turkey or two.
However, we were in no mood for buying fowl. We headed straight to the food area, pausing only to try some pulque (fermented maguey - executive taste summary: slightly sweet alcoholic watery yogurt flavour) on the way. Then it was on to the barbacoa (barbeque) section where we were served a kilo of barbecued goat which we ate gratefully with frijoles (refried beans) and salsa, washed down with beer.
And that was that!
Tamar writes: And then he decided he would come back home to see his poor ill wife and make her even sicker with his foul smelling mezcal / goat breath...great!!!
-Tristan, November 2000.
P.S. If you stumbled across this site by accident via a search engine or what have you, then I've included the distillery's details below. I'd heartily recommend purchasing Mistico Mezcal as a) it tastes very good b) it's a small family business c) you can't fault the authenticity of their production process and d) they are one of the few mezcal producers who have an active maguey planting programme and who deliberately limit their production to sustainable amounts. There is a serious maguey shortage due to the over-harvesting and failure of the agave crop in Jalisco state (where tequila comes from). So, even though Oaxaca should have enough maguey to continue producing large quantities of mezcal, the price of maguey has gone up 400% in the past year due to less scrupulous inhabitants of Jalisco who come to Oaxaca to steal the plants.
But enough sermonising. If you want to visit Mezcal Mistico, call ahead to arrange a tour (Spanish-language only I think) and ask for Eric, the young guy who runs the distillery. If you can arrange to go on a Sunday to coincide with Tlacolula market, then you'll be able to see that too.
Address in Tlacolula:
Mezcal Mistico
Palenque Doña Carmen Chagoya
Av. 2 de abril no. 154
Tlacolula
Oaxaca
CP 70400
Contact details:
Eric Hernández Cortés
Tel: +52 9 562 0146
Email: mezcalm@prodigy.net.mx
www: http://www.angelfire.com/tn/mistico/
