Patrick Lancaster 🏜️

If you've followed me for any length of time, you know my fondness for tequila. Here is the story of tequila and its cousin, mezcal. Nobody invented tequila the way someone invents a gadget. It grew out of the agave plant, Indigenous drink-making, Spanish-era distillation, and a town in Jalisco that eventually put its name on the bottle. Before the spirit, there was the plant. Mesoamerican peoples used maguey, or agave, for centuries as food, fiber, roofing, medicine, and drink. The fermented sap became pulque: milky, low-alcohol, and sacred to the Aztecs, tied to the goddess Mayahuel. Priests and nobles drank it in ritual. Everyday people used the rest of the plant for almost everything else. That is the real origin. Not a cocktail. A crop. Agave is a whole family, not one cactus. Blue Weber agave, Agave tequilana Weber azul, is the only plant allowed for tequila. It is farmed in tight rows, harvested at six to eight years, and chosen because it is relatively consistent and high in fermentable sugars. Espadín, Agave angustifolia, is the workhorse of most commercial mezcal: faster-growing than many wild species, still more rustic than blue agave. Tobalá, Agave potatorum, is smaller, often wild or semi-wild, and prized in mezcal for floral, herbal intensity. Cupreata, Karwinskii, Americana, Rhodacantha, and dozens of others turn up in mezcal, raicilla, and local distillates. Some take twelve to twenty-five years. Many are still harvested from the wild. Sotol is not agave at all. It comes from dasylirion, the desert spoon plant, mostly in Chihuahua, Durango, and Coahuila. Tequila legally means one plant. Mezcal means many. When the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, they wanted brandy and ran short. They applied Old World stills, and later Filipino-style stills on Pacific trade routes, to cooked, fermented agave. The result was vino de mezcal, mezcal wine. Tequila is a regional style of that spirit, not a separate invention. Some researchers argue Indigenous distillation may have existed earlier. The commercial copper-still version is colonial. The town of Tequila in Jalisco became the production center. Early makers were around Amatitán and Tequila. For a long time the bottles still said mezcal wine. Tequila as the product name stuck in the late 1800s. José Antonio de Cuervo received land to grow agave in 1758, and the family later got a famous royal license to sell commercially. Don Cenobio Sauza, who had worked for Cuervo, bought a distillery in 1873, pushed blue Weber agave as the right plant, started calling the spirit tequila after the town, and hauled the first barrels into the United States through El Paso. Cuervo commercialized. Sauza branded and exported. Neither man invented the drink. They turned a local mezcal into a product. Tequila can only be made from blue Weber agave, and only in certain Mexican states, mostly Jalisco. The agave is usually steamed in ovens or autoclaves, though some traditional producers still use brick ovens. It is distilled at least twice, typically in pot or column stills. It can be 100 percent agave or mixto, meaning at least 51 percent agave sugars and the rest other sugars. The flavor leans cleaner: citrus, pepper, cooked agave, and less smoke unless the producer wants it. Mezcal uses many agave species and a different denomination of origin, centered on Oaxaca but also other states. The hearts, or piñas, are typically roasted in earthen pits lined with hot rocks and wood, which is why a lot of mezcal tastes smoky. It is often small-batch, sometimes still crushed by a stone tahona. By definition it sits closer to the old mezcal-wine tradition. There is no worm in real tequila. The worm, actually a moth larva, is a mezcal marketing gimmick, and not even traditional in most serious mezcal. Pulque is not distilled. It is fermented agave sap: living, milky, sour-sweet. The ancestor drink. Raicilla is an agave distillate from the Jalisco coast and mountains, made from different plants under different rules, with a wilder profile. People sometimes call it the other Jalisco spirit. Bacanora is an agave spirit from Sonora, historically made in the shadows after a long ban, usually from angustifolia or pacifica types. Sotol is not agave. Desert spoon. Earthy, herbal, its own category. The rule of thumb is simple. All tequila is a kind of mezcal in the old sense. Legally, tequila is no longer labeled mezcal. Tequila is the standardized, protected, mostly blue-agave version. Mezcal is the broader, often wilder family. It was not originally for shots and salt. Pulque was ritual and daily drink. Early mezcal and tequila were a colonial substitute for European spirits, a rural commodity, and later a working-class Mexican liquor. The margarita and the American boom came much later.