Hello mezcalero!
If you missed our newsletter, today we are back talking about agave. For those who don't know me, I introduce myself: I am Claudio Román, general director of Mezcal MITRE. Once a month I share with you information about this great industry in which I have been in for just over 6 years and which fascinates me more and more.
On this occasion I want to talk to you about our raw material. This great plant is the “agave” or “maguey”; in case you didn't know, they are synonyms.
It belongs to the succulent family and today you can find it all over the world, but they are native to Mexico and the southern United States. Exactly, it is not known how many species exist, but it is estimated around 300 and in Mexico we can find more than half of them.
Now I am going to try to answer 3 questions that I always get asked:
What varieties of agaves can you make mezcal with?
The answer is with all of them, as long as their biological development has occurred within the Mezcal Designation of Origin. I told you a little about her in the last blog. Thanks to this we can find a great diversity of aromas and flavors in this great distillate which, in my opinion, is the most complex in the world.
When can they be cut (harvested)?
There is no exact time that has been defined, it is necessary to wait until they are ripe. This depends a lot on the species, but let's put a range of 6 to 20 years. This is known when the quiote begins to grow.
And why do we have to wait until they are ripe?
This is very important! Let's take a mango as an example: when it is green it is acidic and when it is ready to eat, it is very sweet. As I told you in the other blog, yeasts—through a biochemical process—transform sugars into alcohol. Thus, we do not want to waste a plant that is so special and takes so much time to not make the most of it.
I hope you learned something new and can share it with your mezcal-loving friends.
Greetings and enjoy a good mezcal!
