Mezcal Process:
Roasting has converted the starches in the raw agaves into simple sugars. People break off pieces and eat them like candy: sweet & tasty.
San Juan Del Rio
For efficient milling, the large agave pieces coming from the roasting pit are cut into smaller pieces, using axes and machetes.
real minero
Succulent, right? Here’s the moment when you begin to understand why mezcal tastes so good.
San Juan Del Rio
Next, the cut-up roasted agaves are crushed in a rotary, horse-drawn stone mill called a tahona or Egyptian mill. This releases the sugary juices.
Here’s a mule pulling the tahona after a quick snack.
Prior to the tahona, distillers crushed by hand in a canoa, a hollowed out log, using wooden mallets. This takes many, many days. The distillers in Potrero still do it this way. So does Alberto Ortiz in Bramaderos.
concrete canoa at Real Minero in Ocotlán
Don Luis Contreras
a wooden crushing pit in Jalisco
Bramaderos
Mallets used by Alberto Ortiz in Bramaderos. It takes three men fourteen hours to crush enough agave to fill one fermentation tank.
Old millstone in front of a destilería in Santiago Matatlan
Photographs by Katherine Lewis and a tourist