Mezcal

Mezcal ( , Latin American Spanish: [mesˈkal] ), sometimes spelled mescal, is a distilled alcoholic beverage made from any type of agave. Agaves or magueys are endemic to the Americas and found globally as ornamental plants. The Agave genus is a member of the Agavoideae subfamily of the Asparagaceae plant family which has almost 200 species. Mezcal is made from over 30 Agave species, varieties, and subvarieties. Native fermented drinks from agave plants, such as pulque existed before the arrival of the Spanish. Mezcal is made from the heart of the agave plant, called the piña. The most widely consumed form of mezcal is tequila, which is made only with blue agave. Some 90% of Mexican mezcal comes from Oaxaca. In Mexico, mezcal is generally consumed straight and has a strong smoky flavor. Mexico increasingly exports the product, mostly to Japan and the United States. Despite the similar name, mezcal does not contain mescaline or other psychedelic substances.

Etymology The word mezcal comes from Nahuatl mexcalli [meʃˈkalːi], which means "baked agave", from metl [met͡ɬ] "agave" and ixca [iʃˈka] "to bake". It is sometimes spelled mescal.

History

Pulque (a fermented drink from agave sap) is pre-colonial, but the distillation of agave heart juice into mezcal was only introduced in the colonial era when Filipino sailors and migrants brought the technology of Filipino-type stills with them during the galleon trade between Mexico and the Philippines (1565 to 1815). This is supported by ethnohistoric, botanical, archaeological, and toponymic evidence. Mezcal is the product of the merging of pre-Columbian indigenous fermentation traditions and Asian distillation techniques brought over from the Philippines.

Filipino-type stills, derived from Mongolian and East Asian stills, are very distinct from the more complex European-type alembic stills (derived from Arabic and Middle Eastern stills). They were cheap and easy to manufacture, though less efficient than alembic-type stills. They were made of a mixture of different easy-to-acquire materials. They usually consist of a hollowed-out log (usually from the parota tree) with two copper or iron pans. These were often substituted with larger capacity earthenware jars and bowls, bound wooden staves, or even metal cylinders. The upper pan is continually filled with cold water and functions as the condenser; while the bottom pan holds the fermented juice over the furnace, functioning as the boiler. The distillate is collected either by an internal container placed in between the two pans on a platform; or a spoon-shaped collector and gutter made from wood, rolled agave leaf, or carrizo cane (originally bamboo in the Philippines) that exits from the hollow log in between the pans to an external clay container. A modified version of this, usually called "olla de barro" (lit. "clay pot"), use a specially-shaped clay vessel (or overlapped clay vessels) built into a furnace as the boiler chamber (doing away with the hollow log and the bottom pan). It only uses one pan (the condenser), but otherwise operates on the same principle. There are also many other modified variants, usually named after the indigenous peoples that use them, including the "Tarascan still" (or "Tarasco still"), "Zapoteco still", "Nahua still", "Bolaños still", and "Huichol still" (the latter used for making sotol, not mezcal). Filipino-type stills are also still referred to by mezcal and tequila manufacturers (especially in Jalisco and Michoacán) as the "Filipino still" (destilador Filipino).

These stills were initially used by Filipino settlers who established coconut plantations on the coastal regions of Guerrero and Colima of New Spain to make vino de coco (coconut liquor, also called lambanog). Over the centuries that the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade was active, an estimated 75,000 Filipinos settled western Mexico and intermarried with indigenous and mixed-race families. They passed the knowledge of these stills to local communities who applied it to distill fermented agave. The first historical record of mezcal production is from southern Jalisco, using techniques derived from coconut liquor production from Colima. By the early 1600s, the Spanish colonial government and the Real Audiencia in Spain banned vino de coco and issued an order for the destruction of coconut plantations in Colima because it competed with the sales of imported spirits from Spain. This was also the reason they did not initially introduce distillation to Mexico. Although this wasn't complied with completely, the prohibition of vino de coco led to the expansion and commercialization of the production of mezcal to fill the local demand for cheap liquor. The first mention of distilled agave spirits in colonial records is from 1619, by the Spanish cleric Domingo Lázaro de Arregui. He mentions that the indigenous peoples in the coastal regions of the Sierra de Nayarit were distilling "mexcales", which he describes as being obtained by distilling fermented juice from roasted agave leaf bases. By 1638, the governor of Nueva Galicia also started to regulate the sale of mezcal. Mezcal became banned shortly after, though its illicit trade continued. By 1643, there are records of mezcal and vino de coco being sold in Guadalajara.

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