Mezcal Made By Hand

Duan and Greg have been waiting five weeks for their Ford Transit to be repaired and they have walked all over the land around the campsite, sometimes for miles. 

On one of their extended walks they took a cab back to El Rancho. “ Do you mind if I make a stop on the way?” the driver asked and brought them here. It looks like an illegal moonshine still but it is perfectly within the law and is the product of five generations of Gerardo’s family making mezcal. 

I was blown away by the operation. He’s building a sales room for future visitors but we just walked in and watched and touched and tasted right there where he distills the stuff,  Health and Safety be damned. It was brilliant.  

It’s a family operation so in the background Fernando his cousin kept the stills bubbling, adding water, moving crushed agave and stoking the wood fires. This is all done the old fashioned way by hand.

The agave mash looks foul doesn’t it? He let us chew a piece like it was sugar cane. It wasn’t sweet, it was smokey and flat like mezcal without the alcohol. 

Then we got to taste the must or whatever mezcal makers call the liquor they squeeze out of the plant before it ferments. It was a rich full bodied drink, again no alcohol but full of smoke and a hint of the mezcal to come. I asked for seconds and Gerardo laughed. It looks like mangrove water all tannin brown but the flavor was bracing. 

It looks even worse as the agave mash gets closer to being ready for the distillery. I thought it looked like cat shit and wasn’t tempted to taste this stage. 

The owner Gerardo says the many different flavors of mezcal come from the different agave plants. He has even gone looking for wild agave in the mountains to change things up but he’s lucky if he can find one plant every half mile of hiking across the sun baked hills. 

Fernando was hard at it transferring the agave mash as we talked. 

And then preparing the next batch:

Adding water to the still…and then putting the lid on and…

…inserting the pipe to carry the steam out of the still. 

Our job was to taste and admire the clear liquid just as Angelica was doing: 

Unlike other distillers who add cannabis for flavor Gerardo adds the plant to the mash for his cannabis mezcal. I tried it but honestly it wasn’t the smoothest and whatever else it adds you don’t get a high from the cannabis plant. But if you want a cheap thrill here it is: 

The whole operation is under strict observation: 

The mash is used to fertilize the growing agave plants and the excess water is drained back into the fields.

There is little that is pretty about the process and in the photo below you can see the tannic fluid left over from the still going back to the crop. 

Fernando was constantly moving around in the background.

His cousin the boss was treating us to an extended tasting. I soon gave up as I was driving so I had to trust Layne’s taste buds. She took copious notes as there were a dozen flavors of agave. 

They’d recognize this set up in Appalachia whence I have had some very respectable tasting illegal moonshine. 

Omar was the ideal translator and guide on this expedition. 

About the time this posts Gerardo will be cutting this months crop and dropping it into the pit to burn the smoke flavor into the agave. 

Ten feet deep maybe? 

The finished product awaiting bottling. 

We got a bottle of Sierra Negra and Mexicano (500 pesos each) as we thought them the smoothest. Cannabis would have been fun until customs in Belize saw the label. Not much of a joke then. 

It was only thanks to Duan and Greg we found this place. What a morning. 

Blessed be the agave.