Some mezcal geeks use the term “cocktail mezcal” as an insult. But gringo bartenders love cocktails! Hell, gringos in general love cocktails! So let’s talk about why those geeks are wrong, how to make a righteous mezcal that can be used in cocktails, and how to use those mezcal cocktails to move some of your customers to drinking mezcal neat (if, you know, you’re a mezcal-geek, gringo bartender). This and more in this episode of Agave Road Trip!

This episode of Agave Road Trip is brought to you by Mezcal Amarás. Mezcal Amarás is a company built through love: love for the sun, the land, and the people who work it, and most of all, love for Mexico and its sacred plant, the agave. Learn more at mezcalamaras.com

Agave Road Trip is a podcast that helps gringo bartenders better understand agave, agave spirits, and rural Mexico. It’s hosted by Lou Bank and Chava Periban. 

ChatFest links

Episode Transcript

Lou Bank (00:00):

This episode of Agave Road Trip is brought to you by Mezcal Amarás. Mezcal Amarás is a company built through love, love for the sun, the land, and the people who work it. And most of all love for Mexico and its sacred plant, the agave. Now strap yourselves in for another episode of Agave Road Trip!

Music (00:19):

[Agave Road Trip theme song]

Lou Bank (00:20):

I am Lou Bank.

Chava Periban (00:34):

I am Chava Periban.

Lou Bank (00:35):

And this is Agave Road Trip, the podcast that helps gringo bartenders learn something about agave, agave spirits and rural Mexico. And today, Chava, I am putting away my copita, and I am taking out my rocks glass

Chava Periban (00:51):

Because we're talking cocktail mezcal.

Lou Bank (00:53):

That's right. Mezcal cocktails, cocktail mezcal. So, um, you know, when people say cocktail mezcal, it sounds to me like an insult coming from some people,.

Chava Periban (01:06):

Right? Yes. And I lived through this when I was working at Sombra mezcal, which again, do you know me? I haven't drank many cocktails in my lifetime. Probably the first proper cocktail that I had was a year ago when New York in existing conditions. But before that I have had like a Paloma, you know, just like stuff that I wouldn't even call a cocktail. It's just basically you put tequila and a little bit of water on top of it. And then you call it a Paloma.

Lou Bank (01:34):

I was going to say, when I go to Estereo and Michael Rubel makes me a Poloma, it is delicious and it's grapefruity, and there's a lot of fizz, he does a lot of things. It's not a simple recipe.

Chava Periban (01:45):

Exactly. Now what I call a Paloma is you take the worst tequila you can find, and then you throw Squirt into it in equal proportions and then just close your eyes and hope for the best.

Lou Bank (01:58):

Well, so, okay. So that's, that's not what we're talking about. That's fair. We are talking about the proper, I guess, cocktail then.

Chava Periban (02:05):

Um, I think the term is craft cocktail

Lou Bank (02:07):

Well, you know, I wouldn't even go so far as to say it has to be craft. In the USA — and this might again be a difference in cultures, Java, but in the USA, you go to a TGI Fridays and you get a margarita and that's a cocktail and I don't think you would call it a craft cocktail. I don't even think you'd call it a proper cocktail, but this is, this is really where the market for alcohol is here. We don't have a great history of drinking spirits neat in the USA. And even the people who drink things that are neat. Usually what they're drinking will be, uh, like scotch or bourbon, even they will tend to also drink cocktails.

Chava Periban (02:46):

Oh, that's so weird. Like that's, if you were to tell me that a straight espresso drinker is also drinking frappuccinos, like it's a ... well, no, I just say that because we usually hear it's a personality thing. Right? So if I'm like cool and enlightened and I do drink neat, I shall never touch the mixed stuff. It's almost like a matter of principle.

Lou Bank (03:15):

That's interesting. Well that, yeah, that doesn't really exist here for the cocktails. And, uh, you know, there were certainly people who will say it's silly to drink a margarita at a TGI Fridays, but the vast majority of the drinking public, that's what they do. That's what they do. And so, so there is a market for the mezcal cocktail. Okay. And, um, and that requires a cocktail mezcal. And generally the cocktail mezcal is going to be understood to have two qualities to it. Right? So the first quality is going to be consistency of flavor from one pour and one bottle to the next. So when the bartender pulls the bottle out of the well to make a cocktail, they don't have to wonder, What's this going to taste like? You know, your ingredient. So you know the recipe will work. That makes sense.

Chava Periban (04:04):

Yeah. Because you designed that cocktail. It's a recipe. So if any ingredient in that recipe is acting funky, the end result will be right. And you spent a lot of time just getting the right proportion of everything. You don't want all that to start getting really hazy.

Lou Bank (04:20):

Right, right. You know what to expect, therefore, your customer knows what they're getting. So that's number one. But number two is also the price. So, you know, these agave spirits that we love so much can be incredibly expensive and utilizing an incredibly expensive spirit in a cocktail can turn what you'd expect to be at, let's say a $9.95 cocktail into a $25 or $30 cocktail, which most people don't want to be drinking.

Chava Periban (04:47):

Of course not, $30. Well, I have to say, I once had a $45 cocktail, but I did not pay for it. Uh, of course I didn't, I'm not crazy, but, uh...

Lou Bank (04:58):

When somebody else is paying, then you do want the $25 cocktail. That's fair. Yeah.

Chava Periban (05:03):

Yeah. It was a mezcal cocktail, by the way, it was the most expensive cocktail in the menu in that place.

Lou Bank (05:08):

Well, there you go.

Chava Periban (05:09):

Which is crazy, right? Like who would have thought that 20 years ago, where like that mezcal would out-price scotch, like, it just blows my mind.

Lou Bank (05:20):

Well, actually my frustration is that it doesn't out-price scotch as much as it should, but that's a different episode. So those two things, consistency of flavor and low price. How do you achieve that in your mezcal in order to qualify as a cocktail mezcal?

Chava Periban (05:42):

I think you have two options. Basically, one is you really trust your brand and you figured out how to have massive sales consistently for the years to come and you invest in a very big palenque, right? You buy yourself a massive, well, not massive, but when we say massive people have to understand that massive in mezcal country means something drastically different,

Lou Bank (06:03):

All relative, it's all relative

Chava Periban (06:06):

Like massive for the little town and the context, uh, where you can make, I don't know, 10,000 liters a month consistently for a full year. So you go do that, which is what Sombra did when I started working with them. So they decided they wanted to have a very consistent flavor profile and chose all the equipment and all the conditions that will assure that even if you had different guys in there, even if you had different maguey, you sort of have enough control to not have the exact same product, because the beauty about agave spirits is it's going to be slightly different, but you're going to have the same sense, the same feeling that you get each bottle of Sombra.

Lou Bank (06:45):

You know, I got to say the way that they have scaled up while still adhering to tradition, while it certainly makes a lot of mezcaleros crazy that they're using these artisanal methods — like, you know, using the tahona to mill, but the tahona, instead of being pulled by a horse, is pulled by a little electronic cart that is propelled by solar power. It makes [the mezcaleros] nuts. You know, I, — and I understand why [it makes the mezcaleros nuts] — I got to say, I find a beauty in that because they didn't need to harken back to those traditions. And yet they still did. And I think the end result is a better flavor and yet, a better flavor that is produced in a manner that allows them to do it at a larger scale

Chava Periban (07:30):

Yes. And I think that's extremely difficult to achieve. We spent basically a year designing a lot of those things to happen. And, uh, and it's, and I think that's another point why people don't want to go that way. It's not only throwing money in there, but it's also taking the time and having the brains to be able to do something that it's still adheres to tradition, but uses a lot of the contemporary technologies that we have access to. Right. You need a very specialized team to get there. So there's the other option, which is, uh, there's the other routes you can take.

Lou Bank (08:09):

Which is, which is blending, which is completely acceptable in most every other spirit category. And isn't frowned upon. But here it is. And I kind of understand why, and not even kind of, I understand why it's frowned upon, right? So you, you've got these tanker trucks,that'll pull up to these little communities and just suck up the small-batch agave spirits and blend them all together into one giant mix.

Chava Periban (08:40):

"What do you have guy,? Ten liters? I'll take them, give them to me." And they'll do that month after month, year after year. We even found one of those when we were road-tripping in LaSierra, and we were lost, he was also lost, had a big tank on the back. He was just fishing around for agave spirits, same as we were, just with different intentions. But, uh,

Lou Bank (09:01):

Yeah, his capacity to purchase was greater than ours slightly ... which I think actually is the relevant point here, right? Like, it's frustrating for us as people who enjoy tasting these small-batch, 60-liter spirits, made beautifully by hand with love and care. That's what we want to taste. And then this truck comes along and just devours 30 of these batches in a second.

Chava Periban (09:34):

Yes. And we were talking in Chichicapam with Fortunato and some of his friends ... we're not very sure which of his friends, we pulled this quote from. We're going to find the name correctly. We're just have to fish it. And we're going to put that on our website.

Lou Bank (09:49):

We'll put it up. We'll put it in here in post-production can't we do that. So it's still part of the—.

Chava Periban (09:54):

I'll try to figure that out.

Lou Bank (09:55):

You'll do that.

Chava Periban (09:58):

I would like to use this quote from Fortunato Hernandez who was joined by some of his friends, uh, Pedro Chagoya, Fen Hernandez and others. And I think it's super interesting what they got to say. So why don't we roll the tape?

Speaker 4 (10:17):

[inaudible]

Chava Periban (10:18):

To bring over agave to cook, mill, and distill it. When we are done, we have to pay the palenque's owner to whom we give 7.5 liters per fermentation tank. So it does happen that when people come buying, sometimes we don't have enough mescal and they keep on searching because that is their business to go around and find enough mezcal. We are sure of our work, but we can't be sure of what other people are doing. There are some that we know, like our uncle and we trust his word. If you were here by him, we will recommend him to you, but it is a hard situation.

Speaker 4 (10:57):

[inaudible]

Lou Bank (10:58):

Okay. So, you know, to that point, here's a community that needs this resource, this income. And I don't know if it's, I don't ... I *do* know it's not okay for me to go and tell this person that he or she should be respecting his spirit more and serving it just as its own distinct batch. And really what you're talking about is protecting cultural heritage. And it's this person's cultural heritage, not ours, not mine and even not yours. Right?

Chava Periban (11:31):

Yes, and I think this is really where the bartender becomes our superhero because it's his or her job to be a true ambassador of the complexity and the cultural heritage that these spirits have to offer. And I think they can do that through, through the cocktails themselves, maybe.

Lou Bank (11:48):

Yeah. So in essence, what you're saying is, How do you get more of these gringo consumers to drink more neat spirits so that more of these producers can make more money by just selling their spirits as individual batches. Yes?

Chava Periban (12:06):

Yes, of course, because they are going to be paid more if their product is understood as being very precious and not just a little piece in the puzzle of a bigger blend. Right.

Lou Bank (12:15):

Right. So, okay. So if I'm a gringo bartender, right? The first thing that someone's going to ask me for is a mezcal cocktail, and they're going to want something that's smoky and they're going to want something that's that $9.95 price point. So I give them that cocktail. And then how do I move that consumer to drinking the neat spirits?

Chava Periban (12:38):

Well, I think you had a very nice technique around that where you will have a cocktail, then we'll just make them sip a little bit of the mezcal that was in the cocktail. I think there's a lot of tricks and tips that, I mean, bartenders know their customers really well. And I think it's a lot about just sparking that interest and, you know, fascination for the spirit. And I think that all of them can have some imaginative way of being like, Okay, how do I want this guy to really get hooked into the agave spirits world?

Lou Bank (13:11):

Right. But I do think it's a path. I think it's ... first, give them what they want. Give them a little bit of something that relates to what they want, which is that neat pour of the mezcal that was used in the cocktail. And then find something that is similar that moves them a little bit further down the path. And all of this I'm saying with the understanding that no bartender has the time to do that on a Friday night when you're five deep at the bar, but on a Tuesday night or a Wednesday night, that's when I think you can convert some of these cocktail drinkers into neat spirits drinkers.

Chava Periban (13:46):

Amen. Please convert them, throw them the gospel of agave spirits.

Lou Bank (13:50):

Okay. Well, I think that wraps it for this episode, Chava.

Chava Periban (13:53):

I think that, too. Adios, jovenes.

Lou Bank (14:00):

This episode of Agave Road Trip was brought to you by Mezcal Amarás. Mezcal Amarás is more than a company; it's a philosophy. It believes in a better world, developing a holistic cycle "From Seed to Sip" that connects, inspires, and defines what makes them different in the world of mezcal. To maintain the biodiversity of the wild agaves they use, Mezcal Amarás handpicks the strongest and healthiest mother agaves, waiting for them to reproduce to select the best seeds later. To date, they have planted over 150,000 seeds of 18 different types of agaves, including Espadín, Tobalá, Sierra Negra, Mexicano, and Jabalí. In addition, to promote sustainable growth, Mezcal Amarás plants on average seven agaves for each one harvested out of 10 different varieties. They usually plant in previously deforested land using organic techniques to have agave free of chemicals and rebalance the nutrients of the soil, and generating “Bokashi” as a natural fertilizer from their distillery to create a balance of what they take from the land to what they give back.Thank you, Mezcal Amarás!