Details
- Location: San Luis Amatlán, Oaxaca
- Agave: Tepeztate / A. marmorata
- Maestro Mezcalero: Diego Lucas García
- ABV:
- Tasting keywords: Granite, green peppercorn, spice.
- Buy it today
Nose
Incredibly bright with notes of wet granite, lemon peel, and cane juice.
Others described it as: “green bell pepper” “green peppercorn” “grassiness” “surprising amount of sweetness for a tepeztate. Bursting with sugar at the end of it.” “banana leaf”
Taste
The yin of spice and yang of sweet. Vivid flavors of mace, cinnamon, allspice, black tea matched by incredible sweetness.
Production Details
- Agave sources: 18-22 year old wild tepeztate.
- Roast: Conical earthen oven.
- Crush: Wooden mallet.
- Fermentation: Wild native yeasts.
- Distillation: Copper still with refrescadera.
Method / Background Notes
Diego Lucas García said that they have to be very careful with the tepeztate. “It will start fermenting and get very fruity if you leave it in the oven for longer than 14-15 days. You can smell the fruit and then it will smell like mold and go bad quickly.”
One of the importers, Leo Lopez, noted that it’s “really hard to get that sweetness, a lot of wild tepeztates have a bitterness. It’s very hard to manage that. We do a very small amount and we don’t know how it’s going to come up. Diego takes a lot of time in the cooking process, if you over cook your agave or under cook it you’ll get the consequences like bitterness.”
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