You're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm your host, Pat. I am the director of spirit sales here at Binny's Beverage Depot. We got a special Whiskey Hotline & Friends episode this week, because I got Brett in the room with me. welcome back, Brett. Thanks. Brett's our especially spirits buyer has been for a long time. Also notorious grouch. With us is our good friend, Monique Houston today. She's the director of spirits for Winebow. Is that correct? It's not. Okay. I'm the vice president of spirits for Winebow. Vice president of spirits for Winebow. I'm real picky. VP, you know? Is that EVP or just regular VP? Just regular VP. Like an under VP. Under VP. Special traveling secretary VP. That's what it feels like. Well, we want to talk about something cool today. And that is about the coolest spirit category around these days, which is Mezcal. Now, Brett and Monique both just got back from the region, what, maybe six, seven weeks ago, something like that. And you guys saw a lot of cool new distilleries, some very artisanal and ancestral production techniques. And we're going to talk about those today and really about the versatility of this still underappreciated but growing, growingly appreciated. Is that a word, growingly? It is now. Okay, cool. Works for me. So let's talk about some Mezcal. Increasingly appreciated. Increasingly appreciated. I like growingly better. Me too. I think it's still in its infancy, even though we see this insane double and triple digit growth, it's from an incredibly small base. I remember going back 20-plus years that I used to only have Monte Alban, which was like gold and it had a worm in the bottom. We still carry Monte Alban. Yeah. I mean, it's cool. The way that you knew Mezcal, I think most Americans perceived it as some sense of authenticity that had the worm in the bottom. Wasn't it originally done just to show that the worm was in there wouldn't kill you? Something like that. I've heard a couple of different stories on the worm. I'm frankly not interested in hearing any of them. What I will tell you is that when you're in any part of mexico, you don't typically see, especially people in mexico, Mexican people drinking anything that has a worm or anything that was formerly alive in it outside of agave. Do we know what agave were they using and what were they making? Was that pretty typical espadine? Never really thought about that until just now. What would have Monte Alban have been 10, 15, 20 years ago? Espadine probably has always been the easiest to cultivate, right? Listeners, Mezcal made from, is an agave-based spirit made in eight different states in mexico currently, and traditionally, it has not been made from the Weber Blue agave, which is the only agave you can use to make tequila, although some people do. Do, yeah, tequila. You can find tequila, agave, Mezcal is out there, but most of what you're going to see are espadine or ensamble, which is what we're going to start with here, right? Yeah. Yeah, I just poured 100% espadine from our friends at El Buo. You can find this at every Binny's location. Really, really excellent Mezcal for sipping. It's fantastic, kind of lighter on the smoke side, but really excellent in cocktails as well. And we've really seen people gravitate towards it in our programs here in Chicago. It's really kind of the style that people are looking for with a little bit of that standout smoke. So it carries through a traditional tequila cocktail in a way that you know it's Mezcal. But even just saying the word smoke just reminded me that very often people think that Mezcal is like smoky tequila or you know that it is only different from tequila in the way that the agave is treated. Like they take the plant and they smoke it. But it's actually that it's produced in a different state and that Mezcal can be produced by from many different kinds of agave. So where tequila is very restrictive and it comes from very specific states, most of it from jalisco state in mexico and can only use one kind of agave. Here you've got over a hundred kinds of agave, but really there are about 30 that are widely used and then from eight separate states. So the difference is not in the treatment of it or in the cooking of it, or even in the smokiness of it. Some of them aren't smoky at all. It's really in where it comes from in the agave type. Yeah. This is a really nice Mezcal. So this is El Buho again. This is on our shelves for $39.99. Nice amount of smoke, but there's a really gorgeous, ripe tropical fruit note going on, like really ripe, soft fruit. There are obviously many products that can be produced from all the different agave, but there are going to be certain characteristics, I think, that are going to tie them together. The tropical, the citrus, the peppery, there are certain things that I think you're going to get based on distillation techniques. We have a number of different stills, but in a lot of ways they distill sort of the same way, but they use a number of different stills. Some would argue older than stills that were used in Mesopotamia. What they call the Philippine still is a wood still that has dated to Mesoamerica right around the time where they think there was distillation happening in Northern Africa. So there's some argument and they're trying to do some research, I think, in mexico to see if it weren't the case that distillation might have started there first, or might have started there at the very least at the same time as it did in Life finds a way, as the Jurassic Park quote goes. No matter where we have alcohol on this planet, people are going to find a way to concentrate it. People always want to say, it came from somewhere else, and then when this part of the world was conquered, or people came there, they taught them this. At the very least, this was probably simultaneous. This might have even predated that, which is pretty exciting. Yeah. I mean, the narrative forever was that the Spaniards brought over distillation when they were raping and pillaging mexico, and that's where they finally started turning fermented agave into distilled agave. All right, we got another El Bujo getting passed around now, and this is El Bujo Especial, and this is, it's 100 proof. Yeah, I was going to say too, that's another really big difference with Mezcal and Tequila. Tequila has traditionally been bottled at 80 proof or 40 percent alcohol. And you sip it neat, if it's great, put it in cocktails. And traditionally, you see a lot of aging with Tequila. You see a lot of them repasado, añejo, extra añejo expressions, a lot of them aged in barrels. But with Mezcal, you'll look across the shelves here at Binny's and you'll see, I don't know, maybe 150 expressions on the shelf right now. And the majority are going to be clear. Because most of the time, these are going to stand out one from another, not by maturation, but by the agave type or the blend of agave. So with our partners at El Buo, they started just making this 100% espadine that we just had. And then this next one is an ensemble, ensemble being a word for blend. But blend is a little bit of a dirty word, I think, maybe from other spirits, kind of a hangover from other spirits. So with Mezcal, they always use ensemble. So this is going to be a blend of a bunch of different agaves, selectively, probably cooked together, maybe fermented together, probably distilled together to give you a really distinct flavor. And Mezcal, you don't see a lot of them bottled at that 80 proof. You see a lot more of them at 90 to above, 90 to 120. Which is really, truly their still strength. Yeah. Because you don't see a lot of things coming off the stills much more than 50-55% ABV. Yeah, which is tequila. Tequila would traditionally come off at 55% ABV. It's funny that there is somehow this perception. I think it's scotch's fault. Oh, totally scotch's fault. That single malt somehow- Well, American blended whiskey. American blended. Well, American blended whiskey, which really truly was stepping off a precipice. Yeah. Right. Because in turning something- Vodka pretending to be whiskey. Right. Which was bourbon and turning it into a bunch of crap in the 80s, 70s. Yeah. Thank goodness it went away in bourbon and Ryreback. But it's like artistry. A lot of people couldn't paint a beautiful painting with only one color. That's true. And part of the ensemble process is that not only do you have a whole palette of colors, which are the different agave, as Monique said, there are a lot of different ways they can do it. They usually cook them together, but in a lot of cases they cook the pinas together, but then they separate them. And they might ferment together, they might ferment separately, they might then mix together. So an ensemble Mezcal is not like a mashbill, where everything is just mixed all together from the very beginning. Well, they don't usually make it consistent. No, it changes batch to batch. Based on what they have, whatever plays around. So are these guys looking for a particular profile, and they're going to take distillate, like I'm going to take some Cupriata, and some Espidine, and some Tobula, and blend them together to create this ensemble? Because these plants decide for themselves when they're ripe. You know, all agave only ripens once in its life, and some of these ripen after maybe at the short time, like five years, some of them like a Tobula could take like 30, 35 years. So if all of a sudden you're walking around on your property, and these are mostly plants that have not traditionally been cultivated, you're going to harvest whatever is ripe, and then as it turns out, I've got enough of Tobula, and enough Espidine, and enough Americana, and enough Karwinski, and I'm going to blend all these things together because that's what I have. And very often they'll cook them together, but to Brett's point, because they have different sugar levels within the agave itself, you can't necessarily ferment them together. Because within the fermentation vat, they'll ferment at different... Some will go quick, some will go slow. And then once they ferment, they could then be distilled separately and blended back together. They could be distilled together. We were able to participate in pretty much all steps of a production of a batch at Don Mateo, which is in Michoacan. And one of the things they did, they were cooking, if I remember correctly, it was Cuprieta and Siniso. So they had a little bit more Cuprieta than Siniso, but so they had all the pinas cut. They put all the pinas on the cook together. When they pulled the pinas off the cook in the way Emilio was doing, Emilio Vieira, who was second or third generation, third generation distiller at Don Mateo took over when his father passed away a few years ago, unfortunately. And so they were cooking the agave together. They were going to pull them, as Monique said, to separate them because they're going to be different sugar levels. And they really want those juices to ferment differently, all spontaneous. Then they were going to distill separately, but then they were going to be put together after they were distilled separately. Essentially, all the amount of juice they had from the fermentation of Sneasel, all the amount of juice they had from the fermentation of Cupriata were then going to be, once the distilled was done, they were just going to go together. Okay. It was going to be an ensemble. So they were together, then they were apart, then they were kind of apart, and they were together. Interesting. And they were going to do that all in one batch and get it and then rest. They were also resting in either stainless or glass for months to let things calm down, to oxidize a little bit, to let some of the more volatile alcohol characteristics come on. What a difference it makes in this Booho ensemble here. Like this, it's much earthier and dirtier. It's got that wet rock, wet kind of slate thing going on, and it's really kind of more herbal too on the palate. Like it reminds me more of like a lowland tequila almost, where it's got this like asparagus-y, peppery kind of thing going on. This is really cool. Yeah. Well, remember too, if this is the way tequila is traditionally produced, I mean nothing about most of especially the bulk tequila production right now, which is a bunch of chemically processed diffuser crap, or a lot of it can be, is produced like this. We were also able to work with David Surah, who is sort of the Johnny Appleseed right now of Mezcal in the United States, working with tequila producers, working with Mezcal producers all over mexico. Just talking about making sure farmers are treated correctly, making sure the distillers are treating corrected correctly, making sure humidoras are being treated correctly. He does three different tequilas. He does Ciembra, Ciembra is his brand. He does Ciembra Valis, which is done at Casa Cueyne Distillery in the Valley. He does Ciembra Azul, which is done by fivenco in Aranda in the Highlands. Then he does Ciembra Ancestral. And we were able to watch the beginning of the production of a Ciembra Ancestral, where he processes, like you process, Mexican Mezcal. Yeah, that's an important distinction, a growing distinction of importance with Mezcal is, I don't know if this is a law yet, but I know Mezcal producers, it is a law. Okay, so there is Mezcal, artisanal Mezcal, and ancestral Mezcal. An ancestral is like total caveman Mezcal, where they are roasting the agaves, usually in earthen pits. Do they have to be in earthen pits for ancestral? I think they do. Artisanal, you can use a brick oven, but ancestral, you got to use earthen pits. And then you cut up the agave and to press the juices out, instead of using a tahona or using a roller mill or something, they are literally, you beat the crap out of the agave with wooden bats or mallets in a stone or wooden trough in order to Called a canoe. A canoe. Called a canoe. A canoe. A canoe. Well, oddly enough, it's canoe-shaped. And that's going to, now this is not an efficient process. You're only going to extract about, you know, at best probably 70, 72% of your fermentable sugars out of squeezing that way, and then it goes to ferment and then on to distillation. And the important thing with an ancestral is it then gets distilled in traditional clay pot stills. Could be clay, could be wood. Wood or wood pot stills. Okay. Yeah. I've not seen a wood one yet. It was interesting. I knew that Brett hadn't either, which was part of the reason we were so fortunate to go on this trip with David Surow at the end of January. He only runs a couple trips a year and he is all over mexico in the really, really rural regions. And if you haven't seen it, it's hard to wrap your head around. Some of them are very, very ancient. Some of them in the Mezonte range that we saw are literally hollowed out trees. But there's got to be some measure of copper involved. And so before I saw it a couple of years ago, I couldn't get my head around it either. But essentially it looks like a huge barrel that has no bottom. So it's got a top and then kind of barrel shaped all the way around. And then it can be raised and lowered onto a copper bowl. And so that bowl is what the fermentable, like the wash would go into. So just the sugars that have been fermented. And then you then would lower the wooden top back onto it. And they're really big. I mean, like the size of like a big refrigerator. Like it looked like a big hollowed out Tootsie Roll and it slides over a tree stump, literally like a like a three or four foot tall, four or five foot tall tree stump. They have the hole in the bottom. They put all the liquid in the copper pot, which is in a hole. Usually about not usually always above a fire because in the heat source, they slide the thing back over. They put a little copper bit that looks like a tin man's hat except upside down with a point. And that's your condenser base. Yeah. And then they boil. It comes up, it hits the top. It could be stainless. It could be copper depending. And all the vapor hits that. It condenses, of course. And then when it comes down around that cone. Yeah. And when it hits the point, it drips from the point into a piece of wood, which is called a, maybe that was a canola. But there's a piece of wood that is like hollowed out that looks much like the vessel that they chop in. I've seen that done on the clay cells with banana leaves, too, where it just condenses and drips into that. It channels to a hole in the side of the still, and it runs out a hole in the side of the still. Wow. That's it. And some of these literally are tree stumps. I mean, if all you have to distill is a very small amount, then you can do it with very, very small equipment. This one we're tasting, this is the Don Mateo Siembra metal It's the Siniso is the Agave. And this is a Siniso. OK, we don't have a lot of Siniso Mezcal. There isn't a lot of Siniso. So this is unique in that David was the first person to import Mezcal from Michoacan. So you would always see Mezcal from Oaxaca. That is where the bulk of Mezcal still comes from. If you go to a town there called Santiago de Matatlan, which is where El Buo, what we tasted first, that's where El Buo is from. You literally go into Santiago de Matatlan and there's like a big Mezcal. You know, there's like a thing that goes over the road and you know that you're in the center of Mezcal production, kind of like if you go to jalisco in mexico to see tequila production. But they are making these agave distilled spirits, certified and non-certified, all over mexico in every state. You've got 31 states down there. And what would then happen is they were making these, but they're just selling them probably for the town or the region that they live in. And so as David started working with producers down there, he was the first to import Mezcal from Michoacan in the United States. So these are traditionally, this was distilled in wood. So the biggest difference that you'll notice is A, when you're looking at these bottles on the shelves at Binny's, pick them up and you should be able to find the distillation method, the type of agave, the alcoholic strength. If you don't find that, don't buy that Mezcal. Yeah. And you know, I always use David's bottles as an example, but literally on the back, you can see who distilled it, what kind of agave it was from, when it was distilled. A lot of times when the plants were planted, what type of tool they was used to take them out of the ground, what type of HEMA. So in this case, it's 100% seniso. And so that's very traditional to find in Michoacan. But if you're always drinking Mezcal from Oaxaca, you wouldn't see it. One of the biggest things you'll notice in both of these, I know we have another expression of the Don Mateo Sambar metal in front of us, is that because they're distilled in wood, and if you all are listening to this and you're kind of more whiskey drinkers or more drinking things that are distilled in copper, copper has an extractive property to it. So copper will actually pull a lot of those sulfuric elements out of spirits and make copper sulfate, and so it changes in a good way, most people would say, it kind of cleans up the spirit. But when you distill in wood, you don't have that extractive element. So you're leaving all of that big, earthy, bold, spicy, dirty, vegetal, whatever it is, you're leaving all those funky notes in there, and really on purpose. This is a pichuga. I wanted to make sure that we got to taste a pichuga today. So we just tasted a cenizo, and now we are on a Don Mateo, which is a Cupriata agave, but this is also on top of that a pichuga. So do you want to explain pichuga for the listeners? I want Brett to explain it because he loves pichuga. I love pichuga too. Mostly because I love cooked and cured meats. What could cooked and cured meat possibly have to do with a spirit? Well, it does. It has to do with spirit and spirits. So most of the time, traditionally, it was done once a year or was done as the last distillation of the season, or a harvest celebration, or where they would take the distilling family, would prepare generally a chicken, sometimes a turkey, and they would stuff it with herbs, and as an offering to the gods of distillation, I guess, they would take that prepared chicken and hang it inside their still. So they would just take a clip, they would prepare the chicken or the turkey, or whatever they were doing. They used cannel, they used rabbit in some places, all stuffed with herbs and spices, and they would hang that one still. Okay. So I know it's always had a piece of protein, and then locally sourced herbs, spices, sometimes fruit too, right? Sometimes nuts. Sorry, I got really excited due to one of the meats I read on the back of this label here. Which is? Iguana. Sure. Can you taste the iguana? No, but I've wanted, I know they make iguana pichugas, and I was under the impression we didn't have any, and I've always wanted to taste one, because I've tasted chicken and turkey, and we had a rabbit one once, but it was made with a saddle of a rabbit, and I had heard that they are made with deer and iguana sometime. So this Don Mateo is turkey breast, deer meat, iguana meat, almond, cinnamon, and dried fruits. And this is the one distillation at that distillery that is made by Emilio Vieira's mother. She's the one, she runs one distillation a year at the distillery, and that's the one she runs is when the pachuga is made. Yeah, so you'll see a pachuga style from a lot of very traditional distilleries, and it's going to change from distillery to distillery in whatever the animal is maybe that they use for meat or that is present a lot around there. So if there are iguanas and there's deer, then all those things have very strong ceremonial properties to them. Yeah, which I just think is so cool. And I do, the texture of a pachuga is very often a little bit more oily. Yep. Because you are going to have some... It picks up some protein for sure. Yep. Absolutely. Very different flavor. So the other thing though, I mean, like Brett alluded to, these are generally made once a year. And so they are expensive and rare. So this one, there were... This was the June of 2018 production on this, and there were 696 bottles. That's it. And that's for everyone. That's for the locals. That's for the family. That's for people like Monique at Wine Boat to distribute to whatever markets across America. This is, I would argue, probably the most scarce of scarce spirits that we see. It's incredibly rare. And you see the prices range all over the place. I very commonly see these at between $100 and $150 a bottle. This one is not quite as expensive because they are very conscious that they want to get it in people's hands. That's awesome, because I've seen them up to $300 for one with iberico Ham or something that we sold once. Which is so funny. It's like, how did that iberico Ham get there? It got there because somebody brought it there. I've long thought that we should partner, and maybe we'll do this with Binny's someday, that we should do a Chicago dog-themed pachuga. That would be awesome. Maybe we can take some dogs and send them a crate of neon relish. I believe Emilio would sign up for that. I think so. Emilio, we're going to bring some hot dogs down to Distilla. Well, I'd like to do one with a Kentucky Country Ham. I think they'd probably be up for it. I think it'd be interesting. Yeah, but really different, really beautiful. Also, I mean, you are literally, you're drinking. I mean, it's multiple plants' entire lives in this bottle, but then you throw the animals and the vegetables and everything else. I mean, it's really, really special. There's a lot of depth you're drinking there. And notice also in the character of both of these, because you talk about the oil and the spice and everything, but if you'll notice, and it's going back to what we were talking about, production, that there's this misperception that all Mezcal is super, super smoky. And in reality, it's not. And you know, you've seen pictures of what the pits are like. And so we help build a pit. I mean, they take whatever local wood they have. It's a good hard wood that burns for a long time. They build a pyre with the wood, where they build, they basically stack up a bunch of wood. They take their volcano stone. They cover all the wood completely except for a small hole at the top that they can then use to fuse and light the wood underneath. They cover the volcano stone. They light it. They let that burn for 10 to 12 hours. After 10 to 12 hours, the fire in the wood goes down, or it's at a very, very low level. It's still burning slightly. They rebalance by hand with like wooden shields so they don't burn themselves in gloves. They rebalance all the volcano stones in a perfectly formed like lump in the middle that's even. They hope that the heat is distributed evenly amongst all the stones. I mean, they know. They've done this so many times. They just know. They take the piñas that you stack, then immediately you take bagasse. Bagasse is all the fiber from the previous previous shredder pinas. And that keeps the new ones from getting charred. That exactly. So they put so they cover it with bagasse. So this is in this moves quick. When this is all going down, this happens. We put we built a nine ton pit in 20 minutes. Wow. From beginning to end. And so the stones are there when they're ready. I'm sure you were extraordinarily helpful. Not at all in the workers way. Oh, no. Well, there were there were extra people. Most of us were doing OK. Some were probably less. Reminds me of the time we built a barrel at Kelvin Cooperage and we were just very, very much obviously in the way. Yeah, I said the first time I went down with David and his team to work with Emilio Vera and got to see them build the pit. It was I kind of OK, let me throw one pinion there. And I'm like, I am completely in the way. I'm slowing this down. They don't need us there to help. But this group was a big group. And there were a lot of people, Brett included, that really wanted to jump in. Why wouldn't you? Yeah, so everybody helped throw the stones in, the pinions in. So yeah, you get the stones, you get the pinions covering. And then the second you get the pinions covering, then the guys wouldn't have to. But they'll go through and adjust and make sure that the pulpy side is in and the fruited side or the outside of the plant is facing out. So it bakes and also one layer of not being exposed to the hot rocks. Then immediately they'll cover that up with straw mats. They cover that with plastic and they put dirt on top of it. Now, do they remove the cagoyo like they would in tequila? Listeners, the cagoyo is the very top part of the agave piña where all the fronds, what do they call the fronds? They got a fancy name too. But they all grow out of this one central top part of the agave plant. And because of that, it's very waxy and bitter. Now, they're shaved, yes, but then normally in tequila, you would cut down about 10 inches or so and cut essentially a cylinder out of it. They do that in the field. Most of the time, these pinas are so big from the agave types that they're using. I mean, the thing is, the hangover, I don't know, like the bad part of things with tequilas, you're only using one kind of agave and the agave is coming out of the ground fairly young. Yeah. So you almost have to core it like an apple because these are small pinas. These that we're using in Mezcal, a lot of these are huge. I mean, they can weigh 20 kilograms, 30 kilograms, something like that. So they'll just chop chop at the top and they'll take that out as well, because it is it is can be very bitter and very waxy. They also make a lot of decisions as they're harvesting right on the ground, that if they can tell that there's a lot of sugar content in this particular area of the field or this particular agave, they'll actually leave more green on the outside of Interesting. They know that. So the tool that they use is a koa, and there's three different blade lengths. So there will be the person heading up this team of himalayaners and they'll look at it and say, this particular group batch, you know what, I just cut one down and this is what I'm seeing, and we're going to have to use something with a different Interesting. Yeah, they're really, really brilliant. Probably one of the most interesting parts of this particular trip, I hadn't seen this before, but Brett had a really beautiful interaction with David in the field where we were talking about how agave prices, everybody's like tequila prices are going up because agave prices are going up and da, da, da, da, da. These guys that are actually taking the agave out of the ground, Brett wanted to have an economic discussion about how much more money these guys are making as tequila prices go up. I mean, the answer is none. As consumers, we can't affect it, but what's really cool that we can affect is that essentially, David, everything in the brand, everything in the range that he does, he's been holding back money for a long time. He's been holding back some of the profits. This team of hemadors that works for the family out there, it's like three generations of a family now. It's like uncles and cousins and fathers and sons, and they all have a bunch of kids. Altogether, I think there's 18 kids in that all the hemadors have. Yeah, outside of Arenal, and they built a school for the kids, all with money with profit dollars coming from David's range. That's really great. Yeah, so it's not just like maybe you're going to school every once in a while or you're being homeschooled. They built a formal two-room schoolhouse that we got to go see, and it was just absolutely beautiful. They save money. They buy the same curriculum that would be used in Mexican public schools. So they have a primary curriculum. They have a secondary curriculum. They actually get volunteer teachers or teachers that they can pay a little bit to come from the villages to teach the children. One of the little girls had actually won a reading contest, had won a reading contest for the state of jalisco. So there is a lot that can be done on that level. But you hear, it's very difficult to hear complaints about rising agave prices from big producers when essentially that means that the agave price has gone from a dollar a kilo to two dollars a kilo. Bottom line, it's roughly in the neighborhood of 27 pesos a kilo right now. That's two bucks. Yep. So don't tell me you have to raise my price per bottle ten because you've paid 50 cents more. And you're not paying the hemidora's more. And you're not paying anybody. The farmers are making a little bit more money. The hemidora's certainly are not making any more money. And you're harvesting young, which means you're not even waiting for the time for things to be planted for the correct amount of time to come to maturity in a lot of cases, which is why you have to use diffuser technology to get things out of the It's really eye-opening. And two, just because the plants take so long to grow, it's so labor intensive to get agave out of the ground and depending on the way that you process it and distill it and then rest it, I mean, time consuming. I mean, arguably, it's the most labor intensive spirit on your shelves. And with the amount of physical labor that goes into it. And then, you know, and I mean, and a lot of tequila is included in that as well. But agave spirits are really, really labor intensive and should be very expensive to produce. And yet we still have some that are very, very inexpensive. Wow, this is cheesy. Yeah, that's a La Luna bottling. That is going to be very, very rustic production methods. And that is the Monzo. This is Monzo Sawayo. It is. It's unfortunately tequila producers who aren't real thrilled with the, in a lot of cases, aren't real thrilled with the upstart Mezcal producers that might actually be making things good, have inserted themselves where they don't belong, which is making a lot of rules. One of the rules are to try to find place names for Sinizo. And Sinizo is commonly grown all over Michoacan. And I don't remember what the reasoning was, but nobody- So this is Sinizo. It's Sinizo, but you're not allowed to call it Sinizo. So backing up a bit here, we have two more Mezcal we're going to taste, both from La Luna. And this is the Monzo Sawayo, also known as Sinizo. And what's that one there? This is Chino. Chino. A couple, yeah, Silvestre is what we would call that in other places. Okay, Silvestre. Beautiful. Yeah, but very funky. Different production methods, you know, right off the bat. That funkiness to me, I mean, it comes from, yeah, it's really fruity, too. Yeah, it's super fruity. Initially, I smelled like that kind of funky, cheesy, like a rice-ia type of thing, and then it went away. And now it's just like really fruity. Really, really, really green. Really gorgeous. Wow. Yeah, these are very fun, very unique, like different types of agave. So very fun to taste across these. And that's actually why you're not going to see agave age, agave, I'm sorry. Mezcal aged very often is that aging actually would probably homogenize these spirits. It would make them taste more similar. They would start to taste more like the barrel. And the point of most Mezcal is to taste the difference between the types of agave and the terroir, the land that they actually come from. Well, it drinks, most Mezcal is so refreshing and fresh tasting too. And even if it's smoky, like something can be smoky and still fresh, you know? And I think all of those little nuances will be bludgeoned by a barrel. Yeah, well, and remember too that a lot of what comes here, I mean, they're not making cuts, so to speak. They really aren't making cuts here. They try to control methanol by the amount that goes in, and if they do, they will do a slight cut at the beginning, and they'll just throw that away. That just gets dumped. These are pretty cool. They're beautiful. They're so fruity and green and vibrant and refreshing. Are we bringing these in? We have these. These are on the shelf. They're new. There aren't piles and piles of them because the outturn wasn't, and we can look on the bottles, the outturn wasn't big on either of them. Yeah, I think there's a few hundred bottles of each or something. Like here they have all the correct. 645. 645 bottles on the Chino. 851 on this. And bear in mind, that's for the whole world. I mean, this is a brand that you see all over the place in Central mexico, which means that of those 851 bottles, not all of them made it to the United States. Chances are less than half. Yeah. And some of these expressions, you might see 30 cases. I mean, you won't see very much. A lot of times when we get things from Daveed, or I'm sure when Craig gets things up from La Luna, you might end up with 20 cases for the United States. You might have two in a market. Our allocation for Binny's might be two six pack cases. Exactly. It was interesting too. We absolutely adore you guys, but I'll tell you, Chicago, where we are right now is a Mezcal crazy city. We have awesome Mezcal bars, Mezcalerias, Mezcal programs, and we've gotten things that are so limited, some in the Mezonte region in particular, that we might get six bottles for the state, in which case you'll see one at six different Mezcal bars. You won't even have availability to buy them in the store. You can't even buy them if you want them. Well, the way to spread the love on that, to let the most people you can try them, is going to be put them in a good Mezcal bar. I get it. In the end, too, that was one of the things when Brett and I just went on this trip, was it makes a big difference when you get to go see this, and we get to talk about it, and you get the education firsthand. Because the biggest shame would be to get 20 bottles of something, and then just have it sitting on the shelf collecting dust. I mean, that's the saddest thing when these are so rare and undervalued. This Manso Sawayo here, the Sinizo, is so plush and rich and velvety in texture. This is something else. Right. And that sort of really butyric. Kind of, yeah. Blows off, but it blew off. It blew off, though. Totally blew off. But initially, it was like, holy cow, and then it's like, wait, this is really fruity. I mean, that's a fair bit about Mezcal. We could do 12 parts on Mezcal and barely be able to touch all the different agaves we have. But you can't really talk about Mezcal without talking about some of the other more ancestral style agave spirits. And that's something we've done a lot with our internal education with the staff. So we're going to taste two of them now. We're going to taste a Raicilla and a Tepe, which a Tepe is an unlicensed, like Raicilla, unlicensed without a denomination of origin agave-sourced spirit. This one, it's not like a Tepe. This one we call Tepe. Okay. But it's literally legally is a non-categorized agave spirit. So on the bottle, it just says spirits. So if it came from jalisco, we'd call it a Raicilla. Right. Probably. But Raicilla is two specific agaves. It's a village. So the story is, it's a culture actually. Pedro Jimenez, who is the sort of the buyer, the man who runs Mezonte in Guadalajara in mexico, contracted with this village to get the product of the distillery that was in the village. And for the first number of years, he dealt with them. He was not allowed in the village. This is one of those legendary villages that was never taken over by the Spanish. I mean, it's a culture that is completely on its own. It was never taken over by the Spanish. The narcos don't really go there because if they go into the village, they don't come back out. And for the most part, outsiders really aren't welcome in. I think that subsequently he's been allowed to actually go in and see the distillery. It took years of spending time and gaining trust. It's only recently. So this is the distillate of a specific village, and it's made like Mezcal. Okay. We are going to taste a Raicilla and an unlicensed agave spirit called Tepe, which is named after the village. Really, really absolutely gorgeous stuff. So Mezcal, this range, there's one of the most famous Mezcal, or just let's call it just an agave spirits bar, is in Guadalajara, which is in the state of jalisco in mexico. Really amazing city, unbelievably great food city. second largest city in mexico. second largest city in mexico. I love mexico City, but Guadalajara's got a piece of my heart for sure. It is where David Surro is from, and so it's like you go everywhere that David's eaten ever since he was a kid. Unbelievable food, very safe, very like friendly, and it's really, really wonderful. So Pedro has run this bar there that you're basically by appointment only. You can't just walk into the bar. And so you can reach out and he'll sit you down, but like you're in school. I mean, when you get there, you're not just hanging out, drinking with friends, listening to music. You're like you're in class. And he's just incredibly brilliant, but really started finding these amazing spirits and buying whatever he could, the whole batch of a lot of these spirits. And in many cases, it might be 50 or 60 liters total. And he would sell them through his bar. So you would go there, you'd be able to taste these things. And then he would maybe be able to sell you bottles across the bar. And some of the batches were a little bit bigger. So he started working with David to import them. These we get one or two cases into the, into Chicago. I mean, so we get very, very little of them. So there's some of the great Mezcal bars. You can go taste the range of these. The Tepe is one of the rarer ones that we've really only ever had in the bars here. But... And Mezonte is the brand, Tepe is the product. Yep. Mezonte is the brand, Tepe is the product. So it's got a guy with a Masa Ikanoa on the front. So the guy doing the little processing there. Yeah, he's got a picture of them ancestral style pounding agaves. With the handsome hat. You know, it's not as rustic tasting as I would have thought. I was expecting something that was like cheesy and funky and smoky. And this is like mild and fruity and it's got a nice full mouth feel. Yeah, really, this one, I think it also a lot of times, those funky flavors. I find that you'll get from sometimes overly hot or short fermentations. And this, to me, you started going to some malolactic fermentation. I think these are long fermentations. You know, it's like it's a hot place anyway. And like you said, it's natural yeast. So it's just whatever is landing there and starting the fermentation. But to me, yeah, it's very sweet. It's not smoky. Very, very pretty fruity floral. I mean, really, really. That's gorgeous. Again, this is another Senizo. Oh, OK. This is another Senizo. But they, you know, you talk about you. There's this expectation again, along with the smoke, that somehow they're going to be really weird and rough. Because if you look at the distillation, it looks pretty primitive. But that's taking away all the credit for the Mezcalero and the people that are actually making it. Because while the equipment that they use, you know, the way that they process the agave may be very primitive. The equipment that they use is very primitive. They consider themselves artists. And what they're trying to get is not primitive at all. I mean, they are very much about, they're not just doing this to generate alcohol. They're actually trying to make a beautiful product. Yeah. And so to clarify, this is a non-certified agave spirit because it's Siniso agave from jalisco. So the agave spirit that you can certify from the state of jalisco is tequila made from blue weber agave. But because this is not blue weber agave, it cannot be considered tequila. Therefore, there's no way to certify a spirit made from a different kind of agave in that state, because that's where tequila comes from. Right. Well, except for Raicilla. Raicilla comes from jalisco too, but Raicilla is usually made from, I think, two different agaves. This one we have in front of us here, the Astancia is made from Maximiliana. But I want to say they have a Pacifica or Augusta folia gets used for Raicilla too. I've never had this. It's beautiful. They use a lot more than that. It's got a real weird minty herbal thing going on. I was going to say, kind of spearmint, eucalyptus. We went to a plantation, plantation such as it is in Santos, the property that he owns, which is a massive growth area of agave, all over in about two and a half, three and a half hours outside of jalisco or outside of Guadalajara in jalisco. He had 13 different species. So they were using, he had a ton of species they were using. They all seem to be, they were mostly in the family of Sinizo, right? They were, I mean, but they had some agosta folio, because we spent the time trying to figure out the difference between rotacanth and agosta folio. And he had both sort of bigger parts of the family. Oh, now I can't think of the word. He had also discovered a new agave that he'd never seen anywhere. And everybody that he had ever shown it to had never seen it anywhere. And he was, what did he call it? It was the Spanish word for chainsaw? Yes. And I can't think of what it was, but it had teeth on the agave leaves that pointed into each other. Like opposite. I don't know. It's hard to describe. But it was really crazy. I mean, he was so proud to show it to us. You know, look at this thing that while I was walking around, doesn't look like anything else around it. Most of the people listening probably know that agave is, you know, it only sprouts or only flowers once. Like it sends the coyote up and then it's typically going to be, what is the word that I'm thinking of? Help me out here. Pollinated by bats, so it's pollinated, yeah. So it's pollinated by bats overnight, so it flowers and then bats fly by overnight. Yeah, it flowers once in its lifetime, which can be anywhere from, you know, I don't know when a blue agave would flower, but I know actually seven-year-old blue agaves, they do have to cut the coyote off, so. Five years usually, you have to go a minimum of five years before you start to get a coyote. Yeah, oh yeah, for the coyote. Like a minimum of five years for the coyote to grow for them to flower and then again. You gotta cut it off right away because that's what it uses all its sugar for and if you're gonna distill from it, you gotta cut the coyote off. People don't understand with pollination that that's how you think, well, why don't they let the bees pollinate? But they're growing in climates that are so hot, all the flowers and it's not just agave, it's any succulent that's growing out there that flowers that for them to have sexual reproduction, which is pollination, they need to have, the flowers have to be open for their repollination. The flowers are shut down because of the heat and the sun during the day, so the bees can't pollinate these flowers. Then at night, when it cools down, because the temperature swings are big. Huge. It could be 100 degrees during the day, but it could be in the 50s at night, every night. And then when it gets cold, they open up, and that's what the bats pollinate. Yeah, so plants like the one that we were looking at that day, who knows where it was pollinated, who knows how that seed was dropped, where it actually came from, but really, really interesting and changing all the time. Because there's some level of research that's being done in terms of bat-friendly project just in general to preserve bats and to preserve the native traditional way that things are pollinated, especially in the central part of mexico. It's also becoming an increasingly large issue problem in tequila because the plants are being, there's very little what they call sexual reproduction, pollination reproduction. They're just like replanting, because plants also spring. Yeah, they have flowers and they'll just pull those and replant them and put them in the nursery. But what you get there is you don't have any genetic variation so things can very quickly get inbred. Yeah, and then they're susceptible to disease or to bugs. They don't build any natural resistance to predators. We did get to see, we won't say where it is, but we did get access to a very top secret greenhouse where some plants, some blue Weber agave had been allowed to go to flower, pollinated by bats, threw off the little plants which are called pups. Those pups were collected and then put year by year into a greenhouse. So there were three-year-old pups, two-year-old pups, one-year-old pups. When you went and looked at them, they looked like eight different plants. So it turns out that when you leave the plants to themselves, mother nature starts to create genetic variation very quickly. Interesting. In the first year, they found it in the first year of pollination. And what they're thinking is like, okay, so there are, what did they say? Potentially half a dozen different plants that safely could be in that part of jalisco, that the bats could have flown based on their migratory range, where the bats could have come from. And so he's like, this obviously was pollinated. Could it be a hybrid? Could it have been cross-pollinated with different agave? This was cross-pollinated with Sneasel. This was cross-pollinated with... The ones that we were looking at, they've had tested, and they're all blue weaver agave, but they look different. They're starting to vary a little. They're still going to be technically blue weaver agave, but they're not going to look the classic way. You know, there's little tiny variations. Yeah, it was really exciting. They're having a lot of people study it. There's lots of things in labs right now. They're kind of afraid that big tequila, quote unquote, big tequila, is going to be not real happy when they see that. But it was really, I thought, really exciting, just Mother Nature taking her course in one generation. And the problem with, you know, we kind of are ripping on big tequila a little bit here only because they seem to want to homogenize things. Yeah, for sure. You know, anybody that's in there will talk about how important the big producers have been to make things more efficient, to improve the lives of people in tequila. So it's not necessarily all bad. It's just coming to a head now that because there's so much stress put on the blue Weber Agave in jalisco, that they are trying to homogenize things and make, you know, it's the same argument that gets made in scotland right now by certain big Yeah, I mean, the difference is when somebody finds a really efficient barley strain to make beer out of, to make whisky out of, they don't then make it mandatory across a country that that's all you can grow. That's certified that beer or that spirit. They might share with each other, hey, this is getting more, you know, out more sugar. This is getting more alcohol. And people might say, okay, I'm going to grow that too, or I'm only going to use that type of barley. But the government isn't going to certify and mandate it. The market takes care of it. The market allows it. But that also allows for there to be constant upgrades and genetic variation. You know, it's like non-GMO crops will don't drink any tequila and actually don't drink any scotch if you want non-GMO because it's all GMO because that's evolution is genetic modification. Otherwise, the family would die off. In fact, the fact that tequila now is being because there's so little of allowed to happen because the plants are being harvested so early, you could make an argument that there that the whole strain, especially in certain parts of jalisco, is being Well, I mean, to come back full circle to all the Mezcals that we're drinking, the thing that's really exciting about Mezcal is you don't have those limitations. They're able to selectively replant things so they can selectively cultivate different varietals, but the fact that you can use 30 plus different varietals now and really get all these different flavors, everything that we just tasted, dramatically Very cool. What was the most eye-opening thing for you personally that you learned on this most recent trip down there? You know, to me, the greatest blessing, the reason I was really excited about this particular trip, I love my bartenders. I love them a lot. I love sitting across the bar from them, but I don't necessarily need to travel on a distillery trip with a group of bartenders. I'm not going to be at home making a bunch of cocktails. I'm going to sit across the bar from them and tip them and let them make the cocktails. So this trip in particular, we went with a group of botanists from the University of Arizona. And I am not exaggerating when I say I was the dumbest person on the trip. And these guys, it was so interesting to travel with a group of people that have not commoditized agave. We think about what it makes, what it turns into, what the output is, what a bottle costs, you know, certainly what it tastes like. We're excited about that. They don't care about that. They don't understand. That's not the element. They're just love the genetic diversity and talking about the soil and the terroir and everything that grew around it. So we had a group of botanists with us that were taking plant samples from all the properties that we went to legally, and they had USDA certifications to bring plants back and all these other things. But the University of Arizona, I mean, it's kind of the home of classifying agave. And so seeing this through their eyes, just the sheer beauty and the diversity of it, it was unbelievable. I really look at this completely. I look at agave as a spirit. I look at Mezcal. I look at Tila completely differently than I did. Brett, that should be our new travel policy for Binny's, as we only go on work related trips with scientists. I would be more than happy to do that because she said the sheer joy that these guys just discovering new plant species and more important, there's no jaded aura whatsoever. When it comes to talking about the spirit, these guys were wide eyed and willing to learn about distillation. So, they've got the whole raw material piece down pat. That's their life, that's their job. They were equally as fascinated about what it takes to then convert it from that raw material into something. Which is, for me, the best part out of the trip was that level of artistry. And art doesn't have to be produced in a hundred million dollar distillery. Art can be produced with a tree stump in the middle of the woods or in the middle of the desert, which is what we actually saw. And it's just, it's the pride in what the people are doing that was amazing about this. That it's why it's very important for the stories to be on the bottles, because these are people and this is their life work. And they all have something to contribute, whether it's the mezcal, whether it's the food, whether it's, you know, socioeconomic, because mexico, from a socioeconomic standpoint, is an even more stratified society in the United States. When you see somebody like Emilio Vieira, who's maybe 35 years old, who's a third generation distiller, employs three or four families and 20 or 25 people. And he, that's what he does. And he finds things to do within the mezcal production all the way from attending the fields to getting things bottled, which he does in his garage in Morelia, in Michoacan. The artistry that comes from the simplest place is probably something you don't understand. This is the opposite of going into Rosial in scotland. You know, we're going into Bardstown Bourbon Company or New Riff for one of the distilleries. And believe me, I'm not ever questioning the art of the larger producer either. It's just that we lose sight of the art of what can be done in somebody's kitchen. Yeah, totally. Very cool. Well said. Well, thanks for sharing, friends. Absolutely. We're going to have to do this again because, as I mentioned earlier, this is we've barely scratched the surface of Mezcal. Yeah, we got to get David. Next time, David Surow is in town. He's just an amazing educator and very passionate. And we're really grateful to him for taking us on this trip, certainly. But we'll get him on the podcast some day. Good. Well, I look forward to trying more interesting and new Mezcal with you both. Thanks, Pat. All right. Until next week, I'm Pat. I'm Monique. And I'm Brett. Keep tasting. Thank you for listening to Barrel to Bottle. Monique, will you say keep tasting? Oh yeah.