Mezcal: Mexico in a Bottle and Mezcal Week are behind us now but the memories, connections, and tastes linger. Here’s a photo gallery of some of the highlights. It was quite a show, our advertised number of over 60 mezcals ended up being incredibly conservative with at least that many in the small producers room alone which featured mico-production mezcals from across Mexico.
Cocktail creativity was everywhere in evidence moving from the citrus/fruit edge of the spectrum on over to the whiskey side of things. Local bars like Beretta, ABV, and Lolo really blew this category out of the water. Just in case mezcal wasn’t enough we brought in Salvador the pulque maker who is, to our knowledge, the only person making pulque in the United States and he hit it off with everyone as he chatted away about pulque and everything else on his mind. Stay tuned for more Salvador, we’ll be launching a pop up pulqueria with him soon.
But Susan and I firmly believe that mezcal isn’t just a drink, as our event’s name states, mezcal is an expression of Mexican culture so we also featured art in collaboration with the Mexican Museum, music, and the wildly evolving world of Mexican cuisine. Local restaurants brought the culinary creativity with bites like Salsipuedes’ madrone-smoked lamb neck finished in a mezcal and charred agave-leaf braise, 4505’s sope topped with bbq’d brisket, or Old Bus Tavern’s beet crisp topped with beets. All those restaurants are signs of just how far Mexican cuisine has come from the classic Mission burrito days. And they haven’t stopped pushing, with restaurants like Cala getting raves the future of mezcal and Mexican cuisine is certainly going to evolve further.
Stay tuned for news of next year’s Mezcal: Mexico in a Bottle and Mezcal Week, we’ll announce dates and details in early 2016. Until then revel in the photos!
Wow! What an amazing event, so wish I could’ve been there.