Biodiversity in Agave Spirits

What we tend to drink when we drink agave is Tequila. By Mexican regulations, Tequila can only be made from one agave: Blue Weber. And Mezcal is around 3.5% of Tequila by volume, so … 96.5% of the time that we are drinking agave, we are drinking Blue Weber. Mezcal, on the other hand, can be made with any agave – but around 92% of all Mezcal is made from Espadin.

But there are 158 recognized species of agave in Mexico. Species! And each species has multiple, sometimes dozens, of varieties. So why are we limiting our pleasure to just two agaves?

How to taste agave spirits

Take small sips. Very, very small sips.

Leave those small sips on your tongue for the count of five.

The agave is, by its nature, a far more complex sugar source than the grapes, grains, and cane sugar – the sources for all the other alcohols we tend to drink. If you take too big a sip, that complexity will strike your uninitiated palate as harsh. Hot, sometimes. Not smooth. Complexity is the opposite of smooth.

The smaller the sip, the bigger the taste. The more you sip, the more your palate will recognize those complex flavors.

What you’re tasting

Three spirits made the same way by the same mezcalero using the same process. Ildefonso Macedas Ignez in San Luis Atolotitlan, Puebla, cooks his agave underground in a stone-lined earthen oven, leaving it buried for around five days. When he takes the cooked agave out of the oven, he mills it using a wooden hammer, to ensure yeast can easily access all of those fermentable sugars. Then he ferments that cooked agave, with added water, in open-air plastic barrels – wild yeast comes in, eats the sugar, spits out alcohol and CO2. Then he distills the fermented agave first in a wood-fired steel still, and then performs a second distillation in a wood-fired copper pot still. The agaves he used are:

-              Papalote (agave cupreata)

-              Papalometl (agave potatorum)

-              Jabali (agave convallis)

Like what you’re tasting? Want to learn more? Check out the social-media pages of 1% for the Planet Environmental Partner SACRED: Instagram and Facebook. And check out our website.

There are more than 200 episodes of Agave Road Trip, the award-winning podcast hosted by SACRED founder Lou Bank.

Or go visit Ildefonso! If you want to do that, email Lou.