Editors note: This publication contains a lightly edited transcript of the question and answer portion of the corresponding lecture.

Header image: Elaboración artesanal de mezcal Tobalá en San Baltazar Guelavina, Oaxaca, 2019 by Xavier Peypoch Clavé (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Q + A

Question: Does the post-mash fermentation traditionally rely on any wild or native yeast or bacteria?

Sarah Bowen: Not that they put into it, but yes. People will talk about how their location in a particular place and the region itself affect how the fermentation happens and how fast it happens. They talk a lot about seasonality in terms of fermentation as well, and about locating their fermentation vats in certain places, and how that affects it. So I think that idea of terroir that's behind denominations of origin is very tied to that.

Question: Has any agave species and the related process been introduced any place else in the world?

Sarah: There's definitely been a lot of illegal tequila production. I don't know exactly when it stopped, maybe in the '80s or '90s. So in Spain, in South Africa, there have been people that have tried to make a kind of agave distillate in California. They were calling it something like "tequilaser" and the tequila regulatory agency shut them down. I just read an article this year about some type of agave distillate they were making in France. They're not calling that mezcal, but it's kind of similar.

But I don't think the Tequila Regulatory Council has been very successful in terms of defining the quality of tequila. They have been very successful in cracking down on imposters. So although I think you used to see fakes occasionally, I have never found a fake tequila being sold out there.

Question: The color of the spirits, does that come from the barrels and the length of time in them?

Sarah: Yes. With tequila especially, they focus a lot on the aging. And then some of them use different barrels like American oak or French oak. But that's a lot of the way that tequila is differentiated in terms of if it’s young (the joven) or the añejo, reposado, or super añejo. There is mezcal aged in barrels, but a lot of traditional producers say that they wouldn't age it; or if they did it would be in glass bottles so it wouldn't have that same color. So it's not such a differentiation issue with mezcal.

Question: What flavors are imparted by the different distillation methods, if any?

Sarah: I think a really good taster would say that it's the combination of all of these things, and it's so many factors that it would be hard to test out. Although, of course, you can do some kind of experiment. But the fact that it's either one variety or a blend, then whether you're fermenting with the mash or without, how it's being crushed, how long it's being fermented and where, and the distillation.

So I'm not really sure exactly what kind of flavor a clay pot still translates versus another kind of still. I'm sure there is some factor. But it's a great question.

Question: Did the Aztecs or other Indigenous peoples use the agave to make alcohol even if they didn't distill it?

Sarah: So the Indigenous populations in Mexico definitely made pulque, which is fermented but not distilled, and people still drink pulque. You can’t really get pulque in the US because it doesn't transport well, it doesn't really last very long. You really almost always have to drink it in Mexico, although I saw it in California once. Just to be clear, the first written reference is from 1619 but many people, including archaeologists in Mexico who I really respect, have shown and written articles about how the Indigenous populations in Mexico were distilling before the colonial settlers. So I don't want to convey that they weren't.

But even apart from that, pulque goes back way, way, way, way further. And people were making that long before colonization.