How mezcal is made
The smoke is not a flavouring. It is a consequence of cooking agave in a hole in the ground, and it is the single fact that explains the drink.
The smoke is not a flavouring. It is a consequence of cooking agave in a hole in the ground, and it is the single fact that explains the drink.
Mezcal is a distilled spirit made from the cooked hearts of agave plants. The heart — the piña, so called because a trimmed one looks like a giant pineapple — is roasted, crushed, fermented and distilled. That is the whole process, and every category of agave spirit is a variation on it.
Mexico’s denomination of origin for mezcal covers nine states, with Oaxaca producing the large majority. More than thirty agave species are permitted, which is why two mezcals can taste almost nothing alike.
Agave takes years to become distillable, and the wait is the industry’s central economic problem. Espadín, the workhorse, needs roughly six to eight years. Tobalá needs twelve to fifteen. Some wild varieties take longer still.
Nothing accelerates this. A maestro decides a plant is ready by looking at it, and once cut it cannot be stored — it goes to the oven within days. The wait is why mezcal is expensive and why a bad harvest echoes for a decade.
The piñas are trimmed of their leaves with a coa, a long flat blade, until only the sugar-bearing heart remains. A large one can weigh well over a hundred kilos.
Mezcal tastes smoky because the piñas are roasted for three to five days in a conical pit dug into the ground and lined with hot stones. Wood is burned down to embers, river rocks are laid over it, the piñas are stacked on top, covered with agave fibre and earth, and the whole thing is sealed.
This does two things at once. It converts the plant’s complex carbohydrates into fermentable sugars, and it drives wood smoke and mineral character into the flesh. The smoke is therefore structural — it is in the sugar before fermentation has even started.
This is the main technical difference from tequila. Tequila producers generally steam their agave in brick ovens or industrial autoclaves. Same plant genus, same idea, no smoke.
The roasted agave is crushed to release its juice, traditionally with a tahona — a two-tonne stone wheel dragged in a circular pit by a horse or mule. Smaller palenques still mill by hand with wooden mallets.
The crushed fibre is not separated out. Juice and fibre go into fermentation together, which is unusual among spirits and contributes a great deal of texture and character.
Fermentation happens in open wooden vats, usually with wild yeast rather than a cultured strain. No inoculation, no temperature control — the yeast comes from the air, the wood and the fibre.
It takes anywhere from three days to two weeks depending on ambient temperature, which is why the same palenque produces a measurably different spirit in April and in November. It is also why mezcal has a terroir argument that is more than marketing.
The fermented mash is distilled twice, in copper or clay pot stills of modest size. The first pass produces a weak, cloudy spirit. The second concentrates it and is where the maestro makes the decisions that define the batch.
He cuts the run into head, heart and tail by taste and by the behaviour of the bubbles — the perlas — when the spirit is poured. Bubble size and persistence indicate alcoholic strength, and the practice long predates the hydrometer.
Most mezcal is bottled unaged, at natural strength, without water. A run of forty or fifty litres is normal, which is why so much of it never leaves the region.
All tequila is technically a mezcal; almost no mezcal is a tequila. Tequila is a legally defined subset: blue weber agave only, from a defined region centred on Jalisco, generally steam-cooked.
Raicilla is from Jalisco, made from different agave species, and is its own denomination. Sotol is not an agave spirit at all — it is made from Dasylirion, a related but distinct desert plant, and was reclassified out of the agave family entirely.
Bacanora is a Sonoran mezcal made from agave pacifica, illegal until 1992, which is why almost nobody outside Mexico has heard of it.
Because the agave hearts are roasted for three to five days in an underground pit lined with hot stones and covered with earth. Wood smoke penetrates the flesh before fermentation, so the smoke is built into the sugars rather than added later.
Tequila is a legally defined type of mezcal: made only from blue weber agave, in a defined region centred on Jalisco, and generally cooked with steam in ovens rather than roasted in earth pits. All tequila is mezcal; almost no mezcal qualifies as tequila.
Espadín takes roughly six to eight years. Tobalá takes twelve to fifteen. Some wild species take longer. Nothing shortens it, which is the main reason mezcal is expensive.
The gusano is a moth larva added by some producers as a marketing device from the mid-twentieth century. It is not traditional and no respected artisanal producer includes one.
It is a regulated production category. Ancestral requires the most traditional methods throughout — pit roasting, milling by hand or tahona, fermentation in wood or stone, and distillation in clay pot stills. "Artesanal" permits copper stills and mechanical milling.
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