Looks Like Mexico, Tastes Like India
Clay fermentation vessels … wood-fired pot stills … glass garafones filled with clear liquid. From the pictures you might think you’re looking at heritage agave spirits in rural Mexico. But in fact, you’re looking at heritage feni being made in rural India. Learn about another community using pre-industrial methods to ferment and distill spirits in this episode of Agave Road Trip! Episode cover stolen from Hansel Vaz, founder of Cazulo Feni, with whom we speak in this episode.
This episode of Agave Road Trip is brought to you by Abasolo El Whisky De Mexico. Abasolo Whisky is crafted and distilled from 100% Mexican Cacahuazintle corn, which has been cultivated and passed down for more than 200 generations by local farmers for its distinct, extraordinary flavor. Abasolo uncovers the deepest flavors of this ancestral corn through nixtamalization, a 4,000-year-old cooking technique never before used in whisky production, but fundamental in preparing corn as food in Mexico. To learn more about Abasolo, visit abasolowhisky.com
This episode of Agave Road Trip is also brought to you by JUST Egg. Made from plants, JUST Egg has zero cholesterol, it's packed with clean, sustainable protein, and it cooks and tastes just like eggs. Chef Jose Andres calls JUST Egg “mind-blowing” and Bon Appetit says it’s “so good I feel guilty eating it.” For Road-trippers who operate a restaurant, you can get a sample for free. Head to ju.st/hrn.
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.
This image and the foregoing images were all stolen from Cazulo Feni. You should follow them on Instagram, because they always have beautiful stuff!
These are the cashew apples that are used to make feni. It can also be made from the sap from the coconut tree, but we don’t have any pictures of that. But, hey, you’ve seen coconut trees before. When have you ever seen cashew fruit?
The sugary juice is pressed from the cashew apples in the way you would expect: they are crushed with rocks in a stone trough, and then people stand on the rocks to complete the pressing.
The sugar-rich juice is then put into clay fermentation pots which are submerged in the ground. The earthen “coat” will help regulate the temperature, to keep the fermentation relatively consistent. The open top will allow for natural yeasts to get in and convert the sugar to alcohol. But why not a wider opening? To allow more oxygen? Maybe also for temperature regulation? It sure won’t stop the bacteria from getting in and converting the alcohol to vinegar — it’s still on the feni producer to distill the ferment before that can happen.
Distillation occurs in a wood-fired clay-pot still. This, of course, is how feni is made for Cazulo Feni. There is also industrially made feni.
After distillation, the clear spirit is aged in large glass bottles that are sometimes covered in palm weavings. And sometimes, they’ll drop those bottles into their water wells to age.
Want to learn more about feni? Watch our 2020 interview with Hansel and Arijit!
Chava went to the Philippines and all I got was the one lame-ass photo of a lambanog tasting. And he says I have no sense of romance?
Episode transcript
Lou Bank (00:00):
Hey, road-trippers, you have indeed reached Agave Road Trip, the podcast that helps gringo bartenders better understand agave, agave spirits, and rural Mexico. But before we can take off on this week's road trip, we need to fill up the tank, which is code for pay the bills, which is code for run the commercials for the folks who are enabling us to go on these Agave Road Trips. So sit back and Chava and I will circle back to you shortly.
New Speaker (00:25):
Chava, is that a tamale? Are you eating a tamale? .
Chava Periban (00:25):
Yes, Lou .
Lou Bank (00:25):
While we’re recording? .
Chava Periban (00:25):
Yes, Lou .
Lou Bank (00:25):
Because…? .
Chava Periban (00:25):
Because we’re recording an ad for Abasolo Whisky, which is all about the corn. And I’m all about the corn, too, so I’m pairing Abasolo with my favorite Mexican corn dishes. .
Lou Bank (00:25):
So … do I see some sopas? Some pozole? .
Chava Periban (00:25):
You do! And the best are these tortillas from Maiz de Cacao, where they handmake their tortillas from nixtamalized heritage maiz, which is the same way that Abasolo makes their whisky. .
Lou Bank (00:25):
You’re going to have to explain nixtamalization now, you know. .
Chava Periban (00:25):
Sure – it’s a four-thousand-year-old method of converting corn into digestible sugars. You can use ash, lye, or cal to do the job, and by doing that, you’ll uncover the deepest flavors of the ancestral corn. .
Lou Bank (00:25):
That sounds delicious, Chava, for sure. But you do realize that you’re going to give Roy a headache, fixing the sound so the final edit doesn’t have you chewing throughout. .
Chava Periban (00:25):
Yeah, we talked about it. So long as he gets half the bottle of Abasolo, and a few of the tortillas, he’s good with that. You know he loves the corn. .
Lou Bank (00:25):
He does! And who doesn’t? Abasolo Whisky is the whisky for corn lovers. From the land that brought you tortillas and tamales comes a craft whisky distilled from nixtamalized ancestral corn. .
Chava Periban (00:25):
To learn more, visit abasolowhisky.com. Or go to agaveroadtrip.com and click the link on our home page. Either way, you’ll find your way to absolute corn heaven.
Lou Bank (00:27):
[I am Lou Bank.
Chava Periban (00:41):
I am chill up anyone,
Lou Bank (00:42):
And this is Agave Road Trip, the podcast that helps gringo bartenders better understand agave, agave spirits, and rural Mexico. But today, Chava, we're going to jump in our truck and fly over the water to India.
Chava Periban (00:56):
Come on, don't exaggerate Lou. We just use the internet to talk to people there.
Lou Bank (01:00):
I like to think of the internet as my truck, Chava,
Chava Periban (01:03):
But I mean, to be fair though, we are reserving tickets to go to India as soon as we can, as soon as this epidemic is done, because we're spending there six months and you're taking your wife and your dogs with yourself, right?
Lou Bank (01:15):
Yes, absolutely. So we had a couple of folks -- Hansel and Arijit -- knock on our door, our virtual door, a few months ago because they saw on our Instagram feed all of these pictures of heritage agave spirits being made, and what they saw in those pictures looked a lot to them like what they see every day in Goa when they visit the men ... are there any women? I'm going to say men and women just in case—
Chava Periban (01:51):
I think they might have different rules. You know, unfortunately, we're both not very well-versed in India's rural traditions. So I believe they have certain rules that are a little bit more complicated than the Mexican context.
Lou Bank (02:07):
Okay. Well, we'll say people! The pictures of the heritage agave spirits being made, looked a lot, like their pictures of heritage feni spirits being made. Yeah.
Chava Periban (02:21):
Have you ever had this spirit before? Had you ever seen it before we were introduced to it by these guys?
Lou Bank (02:29):
Never seen it. Never heard of it. Nothing. No one, never in my life. In fact, the closest thing to it I think I've seen is that stuff that I asked you to search out in the Philippines while you were there.
Chava Periban (02:42):
Yeah. That's where I want to get to. When I was in the Philippines, in Manila, I get the call from this crazy guy, telling me that another crazy guy wanted to find lambanog, which is a spirit made out of coconut sap. And I went into a whole trip trying to find it. It's a long, complicated story. It involves fights and getting lost in the middle of places where there was no public transportation available. But that was my first introduction to the Asian coconut-spirits tradition, which ... I think some people forget, like I do forget ... I remember there was like the Asian Olympics. I can't remember the name of it. And I was surprised that Pakistan was there and India was there because ... I don't know. Sometimes we forget that Pakistan and India are part of Asia. I don't know if that happens to you, but they just seem so different to Japan in my mind.
Lou Bank (03:35):
Yeah. Yeah. I'm with you. Anytime I go to a pan-Asian restaurant in the USA, you're not going to find Pakistani and Indian food. We think Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, and then everything else is just sort of confused.
Chava Periban (03:52):
So I think this is relevant because they have things that are, as you say, very similar to the agave spirits world, but they're also fundamentally different. Something that I love that Hansel explained to us is that we're used to thinking about the marriage of cultures between America and Europe from the Columbus exchange. Right? Like we usually think like this thing traveled from the old continent to the new continent through the commercial routes established or started by Columbus. But then we forget that there were other routes and one of those routes was the Portugal-India route, and this is where it gets really interesting, because they do make some feni from coconut sap. But seems like in Goa, that's extremely rare for someone to do that. But the main ingredient they use is the cashew fruit.
Lou Bank (04:48):
Well, I think they call it cashew apple, which is interesting to me because I never realized that's how cashews grow. It's not even inside. It's this weird — and we'll put pictures of it on the episode page — but it looks almost like a little finger or like a little penis growing out of an apple. It does.
Chava Periban (05:08):
Yeah. I mean, it looks like a fat stem growing on the top,
Lou Bank (05:12):
I guess now everybody knows what both my fingers and my penis look like.
Chava Periban (05:17):
Oh Lord. Okay. So it doesn't look natural. Let's just say that.
Lou Bank (05:23):
Yeah. So you know, all the world that I've been to eats cashews. But I have never seen these little cashew fruits, the cashew apples that are connected to them.
Chava Periban (05:37):
Yeah. They look sort of like chile morrón.
Lou Bank (05:42):
Great. That clarifies it for all of the gringo bartenders. They look like little apples. With penises.
Chava Periban (05:48):
Yeah. Just with like a different type of flesh. They're beautiful looking things. And I'm surprised that I've never heard what they do with it, but it turns out these guys were smart. They saw a lot of sugar potential in this fruit and started making alcohol, which is interesting because these fruits were imported from Brazil to Goa, turns out in Brazil they don't use this to make alcohol whatsoever. They just get the cashew.
Lou Bank (06:15):
And so somebody must be eating that fruit in Brazil and in other places — every other place that they're harvesting cashews, they're doing something with it, given that there's like this little nut that we eat. And then there's this big fruit. they're doing something with the fruit.
Chava Periban (06:31):
Yeah. And it's a beautiful looking thing. And I think that this is when a lot of the similarities with mezcal start happening. They come in very different shapes and colors and they have very specific traditions in how they can collect them or not. Like they were telling us that you can only collect them if they've fallen down the tree first.
Lou Bank (06:47):
Yeah. They have to fall off the tree. They have to literally have left the tree before you can harvest them because they're not ready until then. They're not ripe.
Chava Periban (07:03):
Yeah. And they have like all these crazy rules. And I think Arijit did talk a little bit of one of the rules that has both you and I extremely confused. I think it's a good moment to just like throw his quote in here now.
Arijit Bose (07:17):
There are two explanations to that. When you come from outside and you come into Goa, feni is like ... when you go to Lisbon and they tell you to pick up Pastéis de Belém, right? It's something that tourists pick up and take home. Nobody really drinks a lot of it, or so we thought, but it is pretty much part of the Goan culture and the way that GI [think Denomination of Origin] works, till recently, you could only sell feni in Goa because they believed it's the only place that you can get the best taste out of it.
Lou Bank (07:45):
Wow. Okay. So first, we're going to have to jump to future Chava, who's going to give us both Arijit and Hansel's full names.
Chava Periban (07:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Future Chava can do that. No problem. Okay. Hang on.
Future Chava Speaker 5 (08:00):
Here's Future Chava, properly. Introducing the two gentleman that lend their wisdom for this episode.Hansel Vaz, founder of Cazulo Feni and Arijit Bose international bartender extraordinaire.
Lou Bank (08:16):
Thank you for that, Future Chava. Now let's go quickly to the commercial, right? So that our advertiser gets their share for what they're paying for their prime time.
Chava Periban (08:28):
Yes. The prime time. Okay.
Lou Bank (08:32):
Chava, is that a tamale? Are you eating a tamale?
New Speaker (08:39):
Yes, Lou,
Lou Bank (08:40):
while we're recording, you're eating a tamale?
Chava Periban (08:42):
Because we’re recording an ad for Abasolo Whisky, which is all about the corn. And I’m all about the corn, too, so I’m pairing Abasolo with my favorite Mexican corn dishes.
Lou Bank (08:56):
So … do I see some sopas? Some pozole?
Chava Periban (09:00):
You do! And the best are these tortillas from Maiz de Cacao, where they handmake their tortillas from nixtamalized heritage maiz, which is the same way that Abasolo makes their whisky.
Lou Bank (09:12):
You’re going to have to explain nixtamalization now, you know.
Chava Periban (09:15):
Sure – it’s a four-thousand-year-old method of converting corn into digestible sugars. You can use ash, lye, or cal to do the job, and by doing that, you’ll uncover the deepest flavors of the ancestral corn.
Lou Bank (09:32):
That sounds delicious, Chava, for sure. But you do realize that you’re going to give Roy a headache, fixing the sound so the final edit doesn’t have you chewing throughout.
Chava Periban (09:41):
Yeah, we talked about it. So long as he gets half the bottle of Abasolo, and a few of the tortillas, he’s good with that. You know he loves the corn.
Lou Bank (09:58):
He does! And who doesn’t? Abasolo Whisky is the whisky for corn lovers. From the land that brought you tortillas and tamales comes a craft whisky distilled from nixtamalized ancestral corn.
Chava Periban (10:09):
To learn more, visit abasolowhisky.com. Or go to agaveroadtrip.com and click the link on our home page. Either way, you’ll find your way to absolute corn heaven.
Lou Bank (10:27):
Okay. So now, Chava, let's go back to what Arijit said, right? So Arijit is telling us that not only does the GI ... what would that be? Geographic indication, right? Which is like a denomination of origin, which is, you know, what mezcal is ruled by and what tequila is ruled by. Not only does it say where it can be made, but it says where it can be sold.
Chava Periban (10:55):
Yeah. And I think he's also said that that has changed lately, but for a long time, they were only able to sell feni in Goa, because that was the place where people go to understand the flavors. You have to be immersed in the culture to be able to understand the product.
Lou Bank (11:14):
Well, hang on, hang on. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. 'Cause it's not that it can't be sold outside of Goa. It can't be sold in India, outside of Goa. It could be shipped everywhere else around the world.
Chava Periban (11:27):
Yeah. That's where it gets confusing. Right? And Arijit does say that it's a really weird thing, but he speculates that the reason for this is what I said, like, you need to be surrounded by the culture to get the correct appreciation for it.
Lou Bank (11:42):
Well, maybe this is like a complete dead end road, but maybe the theory is you can only truly appreciate it if you know the place and, hey, maybe some Goans left Goa and they went to the USA. And so we're going to sell it to the USA, but there's no way a Goan would ever move to, I don't know, another part of India...?
Chava Periban (12:06):
Maybe. I mean, there was a lot of politics when we talked the first time with them, but they even mentioned that Goa was still some sort of like administrate, like sort of a Hong Kong, but of Portugal from back in the sixties, seventies, and a lot of people, their identities are more connected to their Brazilian/Portuguese background than to their Indian backgrounds. So you're also talking about an extremely bizarre set of cultures there. And I'm sure India does have that problem. It's such a massive country with so many cultures that it's sometimes difficult to integrate them. And that makes it also fascinating. And you think about mezcal and you're thinking about the same ingredient. Like, I mean, you can distill pulque. And I think this is where the coconut-sap version of feni comes in play, but it's ... they're two different ingredients. They're two completely different ingredients. One thing is the cashew apple, and the other is coconut. It's not like they're different species. They're absolutely completely different starting points. And yet they have very similar ways of being processed or very similar traditions in how to process them and to make spirits.
Lou Bank (13:24):
Right. And, you know, this is such an interesting subject because I think you and I find different things fascinating about it. To me, the piece of it that I love, of course, is the process. And just as it would be wrong to say that all mezcal is handmade in traditional ways, it would be wrong to say that all feni is handmade in traditional ways. But when it is handmade, when it is being made by somebody using pre-industrial methods, it looks very much like the pre-industrial methods in Mexico, which, which gives me hope for our species, this human species, Chava
Chava Periban (14:07):
Don't get too much hope Lou. But I will say that some of the tools they use are so badass, they're so beautiful. The fermentation tanks are clay pots, massive clay pots that can take hundreds of liters. They claim they're paper thin — the ones that Hansel is using specifically, they're vintage, because he cannot find any artisans that do such massive pieces these days. And he was even telling us a wild story where people in the towns that specialize in the making of these pots marry the girl, or the guy, with the longest arms. So they are able to make such massive pieces. And they even select different types of dirts that are specific for this type of pot that it's going to contain fermentation wild and beautiful. Like, I want one of those
Lou Bank (15:13):
Well, yeah, but it's so bad-ass to you because you've spent so much time immersed in rural Mexico, seeing what is in rural Mexico. And I guarantee you, you take the men and women out of these towns and you bring them to Mexico. And I don't know what the Indian phrase is for bad-ass, but I'm guessing they would be saying the same thing. And to me, the beauty of it is — and I've said this over and over again about these agave spirits in rural Mexico — the beauty is that there are these communities and these families which have held onto these traditions, even in the face of all of this technology being developed that would make their lives easier. They have held onto these processes because the result is better.
Chava Periban (16:01):
Yeah. But then they will also say, and I think I'm repeating myself in some way, but they also want to be the cooler kids in the bock -- the coolest kids in their towns, making the most delicious thing. And this is super specific, I guess, but they were explaining us that in their distillations, they take a lot of care because there are still solids, like in agave spirits, you throw the fibers inside the distillation, right? And a lot of the flavors come out of the first distillation can change if you use too much fire and you burn the fibers. And they were explaining to us that in feni, there's a little bit of solids, because they're not using very sophisticated filters —.
Lou Bank (16:50):
it's guys standing on rocks.
Chava Periban (16:53):
Exactly. Which is a beautiful image as well. It's like when you get coconut water, right? There's always some few solids. And if you burn those solids, you drastically change the flavor profile. And what Hansel was telling us is that, in the community, that burnt flavor is very badly seen -- it's like, if you've burned milk or something, it's terribly offensive if you're making desserts. I think it's motivation for keeping some of these ancestral or seasonal processes: to get the flavor that is exactly the one you find beautiful.
Lou Bank (17:34):
I disagree. So my disagreement with you is this: if the only thing were the flavor — to like avoid that burnt flavor, you'd use a more sophisticated process. They're hanging onto these ways and developing their skills because that's the way you do it. And I'm saying this without ever having met them, anybody even Goan. Right? But there's no way that you don't adopt the technology if what you care about is, I want to make sure I avoid that specific burnt flavor.
Chava Periban (18:19):
Well, wait, wait, wait. Let me rephrase this a little bit. I'll say that's one of the many things you're looking for. What I've learned in the development of technologies for distillation is that it's extremely hard to understand all the things that are happening. What you say about the 400 decisions the mezcal people make, if you want to map that and exactly replicate that, you're saying contemporary technology would cost like millions of dollars to map that out. So what usually happens is that the more technologically advanced version produces a mediocre spirit because they were only able to map a little bit of it. And let's say the non-burnt flavor is not there, but everything else it's also not there. So I think it's an extremely complex combination of elements that are synthesized in the spirit when being made in an artificial way, that you will need to invest a crazy amount of money and you might not even be able to get there. It doesn't matter how much money you throw in there. You might just not be able to get to that beautiful flavor.
Lou Bank (19:31):
I think maybe we're saying the same thing then
Chava Periban (19:34):
Um, I wanna say yes, but I'll consider it while I slept today.
Lou Bank (19:40):
Yeah. I mean, again, for me, I think why they're doing it is the result. The end result is better and that's why you don't integrate technology.
Chava Periban (19:50):
They do introduce some technology. They were telling us they use this very sophisticated clock to measure their distillations: cigarettes. Have you ever smoked those little cigarette? Like, do you know what they were talking about?
Lou Bank (20:05):
These tiny cigarettes, these Indian cigarettes.
Chava Periban (20:08):
They're very beautiful. They're packaged, like, in a cone thing, you take them out and they're tiny cigarettes. And they were explaining us that the way they do their cuts — which they're not really cuts, but in their distillation, cuts are based on how many cigarettes have they been smoking. So it's like six cigarettes, the heads...
Lou Bank (20:28):
Okay. So to wrap this up ... I don't even know how to wrap this all up, Chava.
Chava Periban (20:33):
I know how. The same way we started,. When we can travel again we are going To India, we're making a feni road trip. So I think that's going to be a whole season. Uh, wait for it, guys.
Lou Bank (20:46):
There you go. And we'll put all sorts of links on this episode page so that you can learn about feni. And hopefully by the time we run this episode, you'll be able to drink it somewhere in the USA. Drink the well-made stuff, as opposed to some of the industrial stuff that's already available here.
Chava Periban (21:01):
Let's just hope for the best. Well, Lou always a pleasure.
Lou Bank (21:04):
Hasta pronto
