Attack of the 50-foot picudo!
There’s a field of blue weber agave in Jalisco that SACRED has purchased. The plan is … well, a secret. But there’s a possible glitch in the secret plan and that glitch is the picudo, a weevil famous for eating agave. Are we going to let a famous weevil interrupt our plan? No — we’re going to bug out!
Agave Road Trip is a critically acclaimed, award-winning podcast that helps gringx bartenders better understand agave, agave spirits, and rural Mexico. This episode is hosted by Lou Bank and Greg Rutkowski of Finca 18 with wisdom from Isaac Arellanes Santos, an agricultural consultant, and interstitial fun from Agave Road Trip Poet Laureate and Official Troubadour Larry Beckett!
Episode Notes
Shout outs this episode to the the 818 Tequila-funded water-security project in Chacala, Jalisco, Emilio Sengar, Eduardo Aguilar from Telesecundaria El Manantial, and Sergio Garnier of Mezcal Ultramundo!
The cover to this episode is everything to me. The art is by Gilbert Hernandez — Beto, of Los Bros Hernandez, creators of the comics series Love and Rockets. When I was a 15- or 16-year-old kid, this comic book showed me that comics could tell any story. The magical realism that Beto and his brothers Jaime and Mario depicted in Mexico and Southern California stuck with me. I think a lot of the joy I feel when I’m traveling in rural Mexico now is the discovery of images that they planted in my teenage brain. I was a comics geek growing up — mainly Marvel with a bit of DC on the side. Then some of the alternative superhero stuff when that started popping in the 1980s. But Los Bros Hernandez showed me a whole different world.
And that art was colored by my friend and former Marvel Comics colleague Gregory Wright! When I moved as a 21-year-old kid to New York to take the job with Marvel, Greg was one of the first to welcome me, introducing me to the fabled pastrami-on-rye at the dearly departed Carnegie Deli! Long-suffering friends are the best friends!
Anti-picudo salsa recipe
Grind thirty chilies, the hottest ones you have, a head of garlic, a head of white onion, twenty oregano leaves, ten of those peppers, a five-centimeter piece of cinnamon, four tablespoons of white vinegar. Grind this all in a blender with a liter of water. Once it's finely ground, you're going to pour it into a bottle with a lid, close it so that it's not exposed to air, and then leave it in the sun for up to six days. Then you're going to apply the concentrate into a 20-liter water pump that you're going to strain and spray over the field of agave. That should clear up your weevils.