Agave hearts. Image courtesy of Bildo Saravia.
Sorry, Islay whiskey, you’re no longer the smokiest spirit in town.
That honour goes to mezcal, the Mexican hellraiser that’s been popping up in bars across the city.
Hardware Lane’s Nieuw Amsterdam serves three mezcal cocktails, Mexican diner Mamasita has a sipping list as long as your forearm and Greville St’s White Oaks Saloon serves it mixed with beer.
Pretty impressive for a drink no one had heard of five years ago.
As often seems to be the case, we’ve taken our lead from America, where the drink’s sales have increased 400 per cent the past three years.
That’s a boon for Mexican expat Bildo Saravia, who runs Mr Moustache, a restaurant in Sydney, and a mezcal importing business alongside it.
He has 155 drops in stock and supplies to several venues in Melbourne.
“Mezcal is like the single malt of agave,” he says succinctly.
What he means is, it’s the drink of choice for Mexican spirit connoisseurs, just as aged single malt Scotch is for whisky purists.
It’s a strange comparison because Mexican spirits typically get a bad rap.
Tequila, that poison everyone seems to have had a bad experience with, is made by steaming and fermenting blue agave, a hardy, cactus-like plant.
Technically, that makes it a type of mezcal, which refers to any spirit made from any of the 50 or so varieties of agave native to Mexico.
To enthusiasts, though, the differences end there.
“If you go and see the process the top tequila producers have, they use all these accelerators during the fermentation process,” Saravia says.
“They’re losing all the flavours and essence agave has to offer.”
In contrast, mezcal is made using gentle old-world techniques that date back at least 500 years.
This, Saravia claims, allows the subtlety of the plant to shine through, and present as many as 1800 different notes on the palate.
Plants are harvested anywhere between nine and 30 years into their life cycle, when they’ve begun to bloom and develop a piña, our solid “heart”.
The hearts are extracted and roasted in an earth oven with volcanic rocks for three to five days, allowing the drink to develop its distinctive smokiness.
The charred hearts are then ground down a donkey-powered stone mill, or sometimes squished by hand.
The resulting mush is transferred to open wooden vats, mixed with water and fermented by wild yeast present in the air.
“There’s no way to know when it’s ready,” Saravia says.
“The master distillers, they just know by intuition.”
The resulting slurry, called tapache, has an alcohol content of about 15 per cent – which would have delighted the Aztecs who drank it at religious ceremonies.
Today, Mexicans have an additional step; the tapache is double-distilled in copper tubes, producing a clear, pungent spirit mezcal, between 45 and 55 per cent alcohol by volume.
It’s fully organic, with no added ingredients other than the initial wood smoke and the water which goes into the fermenting vats.
Which brings us back to Melbourne.
Mezcal’s booming popularity is easy to understand; bartenders love the drink for its flexibility.
Despite a full body and smokey overtones, its heady vegetal profile makes it a winner for building into complex cocktails or for sipping neat in a wide-mouthed glass.
Before you take your first drink, though, Saravia recommends scattering a few drops on the ground, as an offering to Mayahuel, the Aztec goddess of agave.
If you don’t, any later spillages are “Mayahuel demanding what’s due to her,” he says jokingly.
