Hello mezcalero!
It's a pleasure to greet you again. We've been working on many upcoming projects and for that reason the blog was on pause for a while, but I assure you that it will be worth it.
If you follow us on Instagram, you have probably read the word “Tahona” or seen a video of a huge rock that spins and crushes agaves, so today I want to talk to you about this important tool.
How do you crush agave?
After cooking the agave in the stone oven, it has to be crushed. Here, the goal is to extract the sugars and for that, a Tahona is used.
The Tahona is a mill whose use dates back to ancient Egyptian cultures. Its main characteristic is the use of a circular stone that rotates on an axis to crush and tear the cooked agave.
This stone can weigh up to 2 tons and is usually moved by a horse. At Mezcal Mitre we implement a motor that follows the same path as the mill in order to eliminate animal labor from our process.
At the end of the grinding, the cooked agave is reduced to a fibrous state known as must, which is placed in pine wood vats to begin the fermentation process; if you want to know the types of fermentation that exist, I invite you to visit mezcalmitre.com/blog
Now you know how agaves are crushed to produce Mezcal Mitre and how a tahona works. Don't forget to follow us to discover more secrets of the mezcal world and remember that the world belongs to the curious.
