How Many Agaves Does it Take to Make a Bottle of Mezcal?
It’s crazy enough to think that every other alcohol is made from a sugar source — like grapes, grains, grasses, and starches — that take, at most, a year to reach maturity. Most, in fact, are harvested at less than six months old. But agave takes anywhere from three to forty years to reach harvest age. But it gets even crazier when you realize how many agaves are used to make a bottle of mezcal! Find out the answer in this episode of Agave Road Trip!
This episode of Agave Road Trip is brought to you by MezcalForLife.com. What you drink out of is just as important as what you drink. MezcalForLife.com can help you find the perfect drinking vessel for your perfect agave spirit. Head to MezcalForLife.com now and you can be set for next week’s episode of Agave Road Trip, sponsored by MezcalForLife.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.
Some people will tell you that it takes maguey tepextate (agave marmorata) as much as forty years to reach maturity (i.e. harvest age). Others will tell you it’s more like ten years. Either way, they’ll all tell you that it doesn’t have the same rich sugar content (brix count) that can be found in varietals like blue Weber and espadin, which reach maturity much sooner. And how does that affect the flavor of the spirit that is made from this agave?
This is maestro palenquero Fortunato Hernandez, of San Baltazar Chichicapam, Oaxaca. He tells us how many tepextates it once took him to make three liters of agave spirits. You’ll never guess the number.
This photo of Fortunato was provided by our friend Randall Stockton of Mezcal Educational Excursions of Oaxaca. He sent it to me for use on our Agave Futures program, which enables consumers to purchase agave spirits directly from the men and women who make those spirits in rural Mexico. The hitch is, you have to go pick up the spirits yourself — you know, after the pandemic. But I can tell you from experience, life feels a whole lot better knowing you have a dozen liters of delicious booze waiting for you on the other side of this craziness….
Episode transcript
Lou Bank (00:00):
This episode of Agave Road Trip is brought to you by MezcalForLife.com. Chava once told me that we drink first with our eyes, then with our mouths, which led to a serious eye infection for me. Stick around after this episode to learn what he meant and how MezcalForLife.com can offer you an eyeful. But for now, strap yourself in for another episode of Agave Road Trip!
Lou Bank (00:21):
[Theme song]
Lou Bank (00:22):
I am Lou Bank.
Chava Periban (00:37):
And I am Chava Periban.
Lou Bank (00:39):
And this is Agave Road Trip, the podcast that helps gringo bartenders better understand agave, agave spirits, and rural Mexico. And today, Chava, I want to share with you a question that I get at almost every one of my tastings.
Chava Periban (00:55):
Which is that question? I'm scared.
Lou Bank (00:58):
So you're replanting agave through SACRED, your nonprofit. How many bottles do you get out of each agave that is planted?
Chava Periban (01:08):
Oh Lord, do they figure you have Excel sheets that measure the sugar concentration of every agave that you've ever planted?
Lou Bank (01:17):
Well, to be fair, I am a big fan of the Excel spreadsheet, but, to be even more fair, no, I have nothing like that. You know, let's go right away to this quote that we've got from, from Fortunato Hernandez in San Baltazar Chichicapam, Oaxaca -- let's go to this quote from him talking about yield from a single agave, in this case, the tepextate -- or is it pronounced "tepestate" in this community?
Chava Periban (01:44):
I have no idea. I think it sounds better in my mouth, like "tepeztate."
Lou Bank (01:47):
well, let's hear how he says it and what he talks about yields.
Fortunato Hernandez (01:55):
We don't make a lot of planning. We just wait for others to cut or buy their agave. One of us will see that there's a pile of agave and we'll bring some more. Then another person will see two piles and will bring their share until we have four or five piles, which is enough to fill the pit (earthen oven) and use five to six fermentation tanks. The mezcal yield of each tank changes drastically, depending on the agave. Some are sweet while others are bland. To give you an example, once we bought one ton and 300 kilograms of tepextate and only got three liters out of it. Imagine that, after all the work I put in, after refining it and all.
Lou Bank (02:34):
Okay. So there you go. There's one example, right? Thirteen-hundred kilos to produce three liters. You know, what I tend to tell people is that generally you're going to get a liter of spirit out of somewhere between 10 kilos and 25 kilos of agave, depending on the agave. And then depending on the process that the mezcalero uses.
Chava Periban (03:02):
Yeah. And the weather, and so many other factors that are involved, but yeah. But sometimes there's agaves that just don't like to cooperate very much
Lou Bank (03:14):
Like this tepextate, right?
Chava Periban (03:15):
Or how about jabali itself?
Lou Bank (03:18):
Sure. So, but let's ... okay. So we've got the quote on tepextate, so let's stick with that for a minute, Chava. So why would these 1300 kilos only produce three liters?
Chava Periban (03:28):
Well, there's a number of reasons. Uh, it's really weird and it's extremely counter intuitive, right? Because tepextate, at least in, in the general understanding, is one of the agaves that takes the longest to grow. There's legends and stories of tepextates that are 50 years old, 40 years old. I'll say like ... I don't know what is your safe bet on tepextate, uh, 15, 20 years? I have no idea.
Lou Bank (03:54):
Sure. Let's just, let's say 15, on the low end.
Chava Periban (03:57):
So ... nature doesn't work this way, right? If something takes longer to grow, it usually makes more — it never works the other way around, where if something takes very little time, then it's going to make more for some weird reason. But espadin grows in as little as four years, itand has so much more sugars than tepextate. How is that possible? How does that work?
Lou Bank (04:18):
Yeah. You know, maybe it's like literally in order to maintain its lifestyle, right?, that it needs to eat up more of the sugars when it's living. Like maybe the espadin is just storing those sugars in it. It's a more efficient plant and therefore more efficient varietal than a tepextate. And therefore it doesn't burn up as much of the sugar during its lifetime. Maybe?
Chava Periban (04:46):
Well, yes. Maybe. But it's crazy because also something, and I don't know if it'sj ust because it's more scarce, but I will say that tepextate's usually more delicious than espadin. It has more complexity. The flavors — for me, at least — are like ... I mean, I've had tepextates that just blow my mind. So I think that there's a trade-off whereas espadin has more sugars, but the flavor tends to be less complex and tepextate has less sugars, but the flavors are mind-blowing. Would you say that's accurate?
Lou Bank (05:21):
I would. And then I would also, uh, I would chastise myself for saying it. I would agree with you on the whole, but you know, I've had some amazingly complex espadins, as well. And I think, you know, that hearkens back to the idea that it's not just the sugar source that creates the end flavor, it's these 400 decisions that are made in the process. And you know, what I like to talk about a lot is how the sugar in agave is not so different than the sugar in other fruit sources that make alcohol. I mean, sugar is sugar is sugar. And the difference in it, the difference in agaves and the reason that agave spirits are more complex than other spirits is not because of the sugar. You need the sugar to make the alcohol, but it's all these other little molecular elements that develop in that sugar source that create the aromas and the flavors that come out of these beautiful plants.
Lou Bank (06:23):
And if you're going to— there's a reason that we talk about different grape varietals and it's because each grape isn't just like a ball of sugar, there are all those different molecular elements that create different aromas and different flavors. And that's why different grapes produce different flavored wines. Same thing with the agave. And so the older sugar source, the fact that the sugar is older than the sugar in espadin, I don't think that's relevant at all. I think the relevance is you've got this agave that maybe took two to three times as long to grow as the espadin, and therefore it had more time to produce these molecular elements.
Chava Periban (07:02):
And not only that, it has all that history ingrained in it. Can you imagine, 20 years of environmental changes, synthesized in a plant? Can you imagine the oldest tress and ... I mean, we're recording this in 2020, and my father, my father is a farmer and he grows avocados. And what he says is, you know, Mother Nature used to be noble. We could believe in her. Today, Mother Nature, she has no honor, like it will rain in the day that it doesn't have to rain and whatever. So imagine all those stress factors, all that environmental complexity synthesized in 20 years of a plant growing
Lou Bank (07:50):
It's interesting. I would say, in fact, the, uh, the analogy would be, you take somebody as young as you, and compare that somebody to somebody as old as me. And I think if you could ferment and distill us, I would be a much more complex spirit than you would be.
Chava Periban (08:09):
I think you'll be a lot blander, but, uh, let's not dig in there. But, uh, but yeah, I think that's true — just like time, I think this, in a way it's ... you know, we had these conversations about aging and sometimes what I like to think is that in the agave spirits world, aging happened before making the spirit — aging happens inside the body of the agave while it's in the ground. So when you have a new spirit, you have an aged spirit in, in a very weird way.
Lou Bank (08:47):
You know, I think that actually is a really smart point and I've used it before, but here's a thought that I've never had before that relates to it. When you're aging something in wood, what you're doing is you're aging it in a vessel that is really, really old. So I'm just going to take that scientific hat you gave me in an earlier episode and just throw it onto the table here and say, I wonder if it's not actually the same thing, that literally what you're saying about agave aging in the ground versus aging in the barrel is not exactly right. I think it might be on the nose and what — and literally on the nose. And what I mean by that is you've got these molecular elements in wood that's made from trees that have been in the ground for 50, 70, a hundred years that are creating these aromas and these flavors, and you're just imparting them into the spirit in a different way than you are with the agave spirits. Does that make sense?
Chava Periban (09:47):
Yes. And your vessel is the planet. Your vessel is the desert of Oaxaca. Your vessel is the mountains of la Mixteca or of Durango. So your vessel is basically this extremely complex biosphere that interacts with bats, with worms, with all these elements that coexist within it.
Lou Bank (10:07):
Yeah. All of that. And, you know, I had a tasting the other night, one of these zoom tastings I've been doing, and somebody brought up a capon-ing. And so we talked about caponing (cutting the reproductive stalk of the agave before it is able to generate seeds -- which you would do in order to preserve the sugar capacity of the plant in order to make spirits) for a while, and I don't want to get into that now, in this episode — I think we covered it earlier, and if we didn't, we'll do an episode next about that. But the point that this person brought up was once you capon, you're leaving the agave in the ground, after you've cut off the reproductive stalk that would have allowed it to produce seeds, right? You leave it in the ground for one month to three years, in some cases, and it builds up more sugars and other molecular elements. But the pertinent point here is it builds up more sugars. And once you have an open source of sugar out in the wild things are going to try to eat it. And so you can get these infestations of bugs right into these agave plants, eating up the stalks and eating up the heart of the agave, from which you want to extract the sugar to make your alcohol. And while you're losing sugar -- and that's a bummer because that's going to reduce your yield, right? This is an episode about yield —while, that's a bummer, I also think some of those bugs are going to be crapping and pissing where they're eating and that's going to create other aromas and flavors. Yes?
Chava Periban (11:26):
That's so sexy. Yes. You are a great salesman, Lou, but yes. And it gets to the point where, when we were buying agave, when I was working Oaxaca, there was this guy that was like, You know what I want? I usually like for a few worms to have been in the agave. And there were like these brown stains that you will sometimes see in the agave He's like, But I don't want too much. So he will go in there and select the agave — the pinas — that had a certain amount of worm marks, to separate them to make different fermentation tanks, to have a similar ratio.
Lou Bank (12:05):
I think what he's doing, this is interesting. I think what he's doing is he doesn't want too much because he doesn't want to have the loss from all of the worms eating it up, but he wants a little bit so that the worms have said, You know what? This is a good one. And you just, you grabbed it before too many of the other worms got into it. I love that.
Chava Periban (12:24):
It's like, when I was a kid, my mother will always tell us when you choose a fruit from a tree, choose the ones that have been already had, you know, a little bit taken by the birds, because they're smarter than you. And they go for the really sweet stuff. Yeah. There you go.
Lou Bank (12:39):
Oh, okay. So your mom is correct. The birds are smarter than you. And I think that's the end of this episode. I think we can end it on that.
Lou Bank (12:48):
El finale!
Lou Bank (12:48):
okay, Chava, I'll catch you next time.
Chava Periban (12:49):
Adios!
Lou Bank (12:48):
Uh, I have a question about your introduction to this episode, Lou. Did I understand you correctly? You got an eye infection when you followed my advice?
Lou Bank (13:12):
Well, you know, to be fair, first, I'm not great at following instructions.
Speaker 4 (13:16):
Well, yeah, I get that, but—
Lou Bank (13:20):
And it wasn't really an infection. My eye just burnt for a few hours.
Chava Periban (13:24):
So let me guess: when I told you that we first drink with our eyes, then you actually tried it where—
Lou Bank (13:33):
Yeah. I put the, I put the cocopita to my eye.
Chava Periban (13:36):
Well, that's not as bad as I thought, but that's not what I meant.
Lou Bank (13:40):
I wish I hadn't been drinking puntas.
Chava Periban (13:42):
Oh Lord. What I meant was that when we drink out of something, it is important, not just because of the shape of the vessel and how it affects the flavors, but also because if it looks beautiful, then it creates a beautiful experience, Lou.
Lou Bank (13:56):
Is this you telling me again in your very, very Chava way to get rid of the mustard jars?
Chava Periban (14:03):
Like, it's just, I cannot understand how can you put something as beautiful as the agave spirits you have in your house into something like that. But—
Lou Bank (14:12):
And you're saying mustard jars aren't beautiful?
Chava Periban (14:15):
Oh, they're the most horrific things I've ever seen in my life. And like, that's why you need to go get some beautiful vessels from MezcalForLife.Com.
Lou Bank (14:25):
Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. These are beautiful, Chava.
Chava Periban (14:27):
Right? MezcalForLife.com offers a wide selection of beautiful drinking vessels that will make the experience of drinking beautiful agave spirits even better. I'm using beautiful so much. I like that.
Lou Bank (14:41):
It's a drinking game. Every time Chava says, "Beautiful," you drink.
Chava Periban (14:44):
Yeah. So yeah.
Lou Bank (14:46):
So MezcalForLife.com offers artisanally made copitas for artisanally made agave spirits, for that true, artisanal Mexican experience.
Chava Periban (14:58):
That's right, Lou. And MezcalForLife.com offers so much more.
Lou Bank (15:00):
MezcalForLife.com can help you find a perfect drinking vessel for your perfect agave spirit. Head to MezcalForLife.com now, and you can be set for next week's episode of Agave Road trip, sponsored by MezcalForLife.com.
