Heritage Mezcal

Different places ask for different drinks, even certain music styles, in my opinion, need specific booze pairings. And even though I am always the first to complain when I can't find delicious complex spirits in the middle of the night. I am starting to understand that calibrating which booze is served on a dancefloor is a important as the stage and lights design.Without further adieu, please welcome Roberto Ávila, and his many insights on  how to create accurate booze experiences.

There are so many reasons why people may start a mezcal brand.  Some do it for the  money, some for love and some others because the craft has been in their families for generations. But regardless of how you started, nobody, to my understanding, has found a perfect formula to maintain exceptional quality while still paying the bills.Without further adieu please welcome Sergio Garnier, from Ultramundo Mezcal,  and his rather atypical approach to owning a mezcal brand.

Like many agricultural products, agaves have developed a complex relationship  with humans over millennia. Some agaves were chosen to make rope, others to extract pulque and maybe the luckiest of them all to create mezcal. But there've been many other more subtle ways in which people have chosen their favorite agaves to deal with. In this conversation with Fabio Raya we talk about the agaves that were favored in Brazil versus those that we decided to love in Mexico.

For a while I was not sure if I  wanted to publish this episode. But I think there are quite a few  things hiding in the middle of this conversation that somehow relate to the clash of cultures within mezcal. Without further adieu please welcome Dalton Kreiss and his impressive affection for dogs.

This episode is not about a new religion, so don't you worry. This episode is about trying to better understand some of the people in the tequila, mezcal  and agave spirits multiverse that I would say have a very clear and unmovable set of ideas of how these categories should behave. So I decided to do an episode, with my  good friend Jon Darby. I've referred to him before as one of the worst purists in the business, but he knows I say with affection.Without further adieu please welcome Jon and his intense and tender love for mezcalito.

I've been thinking so much about the things that are so close to us, so ubiquitous,  that we decide to erase them completely. Octavio Paz, our literature nobel prize,  explores this intensively in his famous book "The Labyrinth of Solitude". He talks about "Ningunear", which is the act of making someone, no one. We've done this to so many Mexican products. but a group that I believe has been  ninguneado like no other, are the thousands of traditional herbs that are still used today   for making delicious infusions. Without further adieu please welcome Monica Favila, and her love for all glorious herbs and teas.

Having a conversation with Vinik is never a straight line. We always allocates the unexpected crevices, he finds ways of expanding what may seem bland and inoffensive.He may even be a spy, considering his very  avid interest on maps, borders and the rivers that run through them. But the most important thing, is that he is a rather entertaining human to share conversations and mezcalitos. Without further adieu, please welcome Vinik Jure, and his aggressively eclectic mind. 

Welcome to the longest episode I've ever recorded. And usually I would say this as a warning,  but while listening to it I realized that this conversation touched on so many things that I believe are critical not only to cacao  but to all Mexican craft, including agave spirits.Without further adieu please welcome Jose Lopez Ganem and his poignant perspective on how we can  create a slightly better world through cacao.

There are a multitude of different names that people use to call agave spirits around Mexico. The most prominent ones are obviously Tequila and Mezcal. But if you travel a bit more you'll find names like Tepe, Ixcateco, Minero, Bacanora, Raicilla and so on and so on.Tuxca is one of those names. But I find that currently there is a good  amount of misinformation about the origin  and history of such a name. So I decided to  invite Edwin, who is currently  making his doctoral thesis about historical tabernas, to give us a little bit more insights into what Tuxca really means. Please welcome Edwin Mayoral,  and his passion for vino de cocos y vino de mezcal.

I've always been fascinated about how things travel and get to be transformed. One of my favorite stories on the matter is how Jose Luis Borges decided to learn Icelandic just to have access to language that has been frozen in time within a very cold and isolated island (excuse the pun). Mexico is the complete opposite, both our language and our culture has traveled and has been transformed in a multitude of ways. In today's world, in which a big part of having a restaurant or a bar is being able to "play" and engage with the ingredients and techniques of over cultures, I like to think of this as a "Translate and Expand" approach. I had been wanting for a long time to interview someone that had a good deal of experience doing such a thing and having Matthias Inglemann as an invitee was a strike of luck that I very grateful for. Hope you enjoy this episode!

The controversies around who gets to use the words tequila or mezcal are never ending. All of which are linked to how the PDOS, or Protected Designations of Origin, for each one of these products were written.That is why I decided to invite the man I call the “Cheese Superman” to this podcast. I find cheese to be very relevant to understand this matter because one of the first PDOs, back in 1925, was created to protect Roquefort and fight its counterfeits. According to the Roquefort official website this has allowed for  Roquefort to be serenely modern and more relevant than ever. Please welcome Zach Berg and his cheesmongering parlance.

If you want to pick up a quick fight with a mezcal nerd you just need to start throwing compliments to añejos and reposados.It'll get even worse if you claim that the best Tepextate you've ever had spent 12 years in bourbon barrels  and that the most complex sotol you've ever encountered was pink and shiny  from resting in barrels  previously used to mature red wine. Even at the risk of creating some violent confrontations  I wanted to explore the world of aging,  but instead of using the very controversial agave as a study case, I decided to delve into the intricacies of aging sugarcane spirits.So without further adieu please welcome Keegan Meneses and his  tremendous passion for all things rum.

For the last months I've realized that just like mezcal, so many other Mexican culinary products have been neglected over the years. By now we've touched on traditional fermented products like tolonche, we've explored coffee fermentation, herbal infusions and now, naturally, it is the turn of honey. To understand honey's extremely ample world I was lucky enough to have Arlette Gómez as an invitee. She has one of the most gifted palates I've ever encountered and her encyclopedic memory was able to juggle every one of my silly questions. I hope you enjoy it!

Agave spirits have been around for at least a few hundred years and within that time they've traveled, they've evolved,  they've been prosecuted by the authorities, they've been neglected by modernity and finally, just around 25 years ago, they started to win the hearts of the spirits and cocktail nerds. Now mezcal is a global phenomena, but to be absolutely honest, that is rather surprising. So I've been tracking some of the people that arrived at this scene right when things were starting to change. In this episode I was lucky enough to have John McEvoy as an invitee. He was there when nobody could explain what mezcal was at gringo bars, when bottles had hotmail emails stamped on their sides, and even decided to invest in the category when it  was unlikely for mezcal to secure any growth. Without further adieu please welcome John, better known as Mezcal PhD. 

This may be the most  heartbreaking episode that I've ever done. In this conversation with Dalton Kreiss we'll go over mezcal logistics. Because it is not enough to find a very delicious mezcal. Which is a lot of work already, but you also have to deal with regulations, transportation and all sorts of mysterious things before someone can actually acquire what you've chosen with a lot of love. So if you are planning to start an agave spirits brand this may be the episode that could convince you to do otherwise.  You may prefer to just stay as a committed nerd, instead of  having to endure all of the pains that we'll describe in this episode. Without further adieu, welcome joven Dalton and his unparalleled passion for logistics.

There is not a unique approach to making mezcal or coffee, so it shouldn't be surprising to realize that there are many different ways to dissect their flavors.  A few episodes ago I had a long and illuminating conversation with Eric Kozlik about flavor and I wanted to compare and contrast our discussion from a coffee perspective.Coffee is an interesting study-case because it is one of the most consumed commodities in the world. So I had always thought that their tasting protocols were rather strict and homogenous.  Regardless of the medium, be it honey, mezcal, tea or coffee; we are all trying to find and sell the most delicious things possible.  But how exactly do we identify and describe deliciousness? Does it change depending on the country and culture? Is it a static thing? Or maybe it does change depending on who you are and how you perceive yourself.  Grab some pretty coffee and let's talk about its flavors. 

I listened to this episode with Roberto Ávila (school manager of the Bartending European School in Mexico) a few times trying to come up with a proper introduction. But like I mention at the end of it, it is a bit like a Simpsons episode. The narrative arc is over the place and we jump  from working in Dubai to drinking like a Mexican teenager; from how to pair your tacos to how to run a bar. Hope you enjoy this rather eclectic approach. 

If there is something that is practiced by every culture I’ve ever encountered is boiling leaves, herbs and/or flowers to make comforting or delicious drinks. In my household my mother preferred teas over conventional medicine : anis estrella for the stomach, manzanilla for insomnia and bugambilia to scare the flu away were amongst the many other “creations'  that she came up with over the years to alleviate even the most stubborn of pains. But it was not until I tried tea in Taiwan that I found an amazing array of flavors connected to the different leaves, processes and ways to prepare it. Tea leaves, just like agave, are great  and ancient storytellers. Not only have humans consumed tea for thousands of years but some of the trees used to make puer   can be more than hundred years old. When I met  Mónica Favila, today’s invitee, I was thrilled at the prospect of better understanding this medium and trying some of the delicious expressions that she collects.

Everything that I read and hear around agave spirits these days suggests that the people and places that sustain this heritage are at risk.It is clear to me that we are at a time that if we don't do something there may be a day when homogeneity will take over. The days of thinking about the possibilities brought by the ample agave diversity will be gone and we'll end up with something as boring as the cavendish banana. At the same time there are many ways to resist, to promote change and to make people care deeply about mezcal and the artisans that make it. While reading @vinikjure essays I realized that many of them referred to “joyful resistance”, which seemed a way more effective approach than the usual hostility or mockery that I get to see in this industry. This approach does have its limitations, but in this episode I think we do a fairly good job in exploring many of the reasons why working from this framework may allow us to further empower the full mezcal multiverse.

Every country is a brand. If you want to buy cameras you are probably looking at Japan or Germany;  if you have an interest in silk or denim, you may look for French or Italian goods.  But when we talk about Mexico, what does our national brand stand for?  What is our global reputation? Is our vast biocultural heritage being promoted or are we just being reduced to tequila, tourism and avocados?  Beyond some ontological drama, is our brand strengthening the overall economy and promoting social equality or is it just making money for a few very visible entities?I know these are extremely loaded questions but somehow we found a way to make a multitude of jokes around them. Please welcome to the podcast  José López Ganem and his infinite set of academic parables.