Before Distillation

It’s before dawn outside Miahuatlán, Oaxaca. A jimador has been climbing since before first light — up a slope that doesn’t have a path, through scrub and loose stone, to a plant that’s been growing here since before his daughter was born.

Twenty-five years. Same hillside. Same soil. Same exposure to the same seasonal rains and the same dry months. The plant doesn’t know about any of that — the years, the waiting, the economics of what it’s about to become. It just grew.

He cuts the quiote — the flowering stalk, just beginning to emerge from the center — before it can bloom. He strips the thick, spine-tipped leaves with a coa, the curved blade flashing in the early light, cut after cut after cut until what’s left is a dense, fibrous, roughly pineapple-shaped core. The piña. He’ll need help carrying it down.

The drink this piña will eventually become is called traditional mezcal. It will be aged in some cases, blended in others, bottled and labeled and shipped to bars in New York and London and Tokyo, where it will be poured into small clay copitas and described as authentic, ancestral, a pure expression of Mexican culture.

None of that is wrong. None of that is the whole story.

Before mezcal, before distillation, before the Spanish arrived, there was pulque.

In Nahuatl it was called octli. The Spanish would rename it — their word “pulque” is almost certainly a corruption of octli poliuhqui, which means spoiled octli. According to at least one account, that’s exactly what the Aztecs gave them when they asked for a taste. The conquerors got the leftovers. The good stuff stayed.

The plant is Agave salmiana — the maguey. When it approaches maturity, the tlachiquero — the harvester, a role passed down through generations — cuts the quiote before it has a chance to bloom, hollows the center of the plant into a bowl called a cajete, and then returns twice a day, every day, for months. He comes with an acocote: a dried, hollowed gourd, long and curved. He places one end into the accumulated sap and draws it up by suction, then empties it into a carrying vessel. Up to six liters a day. The plant keeps producing until it doesn’t anymore, and then it dies.

The sap is called aguamiel — honey water. It begins fermenting within hours of collection, driven by wild yeasts and bacteria, primarily Zymomonas mobilis. Leave it twelve to twenty-four hours and it becomes pulque: frothy, milky-white, viscous, slightly sour, somewhere between 4 and 6 percent ABV. It’s alive with probiotics, rich in B vitamins, amino acids, and prebiotic fructooligosaccharides that feed the gut microbiome. It’s also perishable. It spoils within three days. It cannot travel far. It belongs, fundamentally, to where it’s made.

The cosmological architecture the Aztecs built around this drink was vast. Mayahuel was the goddess of the maguey — depicted with four hundred breasts, each one producing pulque rather than milk. According to myth, she was killed by demons, and Quetzalcoatl planted her remains, and from them grew the first agave. Her consort was Patecatl, god of medicine and pulque, who discovered the roots used in fermentation. Their children were the Centzontochtli — the 400 rabbit gods of drunkenness. In Aztec numerology, 400 was the number of infinity. There were infinite forms of intoxication, each with its own deity. A culture that builds that level of theological infrastructure around a drink has thought about that drink with great care.

Consumption was tightly regulated. Priests, nobles, warriors, the elderly — they could drink, in specific ritual contexts, in specific quantities. Commoners caught drunk outside sanctioned ceremonies faced escalating punishment. First offense: public shaving and demolition of their house. Second offense: death. The one universal exception was anyone over seventy. They had fulfilled their duties to the empire, and the empire let them drink in peace.

To understand what distillation met when it arrived in Mexico, you have to understand the agave plant as a biological system.

Agave uses CAM photosynthesis — Crassulacean Acid Metabolism — keeping its stomata closed during the day to prevent water loss and opening them only at night to absorb carbon dioxide. It spreads shallow roots wide to catch whatever moisture reaches the ground. Its thick, waxy leaves hold water against heat that would kill most plants. It is a machine built for survival in conditions that preclude survival for almost everything else.

While it waits — for years, or even decades — it accumulates fructans. Fructose-based carbohydrate polymers, stored in the piña as energy reserves, as drought insurance, as fuel for the one event the plant has spent its entire life preparing for: the quiote. Agave flowers once and dies. Everything stored in that piña goes into that final bloom — the stalk can reach forty feet — and then it’s over. The plant reproduces once and is done.

What this means for anyone who wants to make spirits from agave is that the fructans in the piña are not directly fermentable. They’re long-chain polymers, locked together by glycosidic bonds. Yeast cannot access them. To release the fermentable sugars, you have to break those bonds. Heat does this — thermal hydrolysis, the addition of water molecules across the bonds under temperature, cleaving the long chains down into individual fructose molecules that yeast can work with. Before cooking, the piña is over 80 percent fructans and roughly 12 percent free fructose. After cooking, those ratios roughly reverse.

How you apply the heat determines what the spirit will taste like. In an underground pit lined with heated stones and mesquite wood, and sealed for three to five days, the smoke penetrates the piña, the moist heat hydrolyzes the fructans slowly, and complex flavors develop over days of low, steady heat. In an above-ground brick oven, it’s cleaner, with less smoke, but still traditional. In an industrial autoclave, it's pressurized steam, eight to twelve hours, efficient, consistent, and neutral. Three methods. Three radically different flavor profiles. All built on the same underlying chemistry.

The Espadín agave — the most common mezcal species, the workhorse of Oaxacan production — matures in six to twelve years. The Tobalá in ten to fifteen. The Tepeztate, which grows wild on rocky cliffs at high altitude, takes twenty-five to thirty-five years. The jimador reading that hillside plant in the dark before dawn isn’t just a farmer. He’s a reader of time.

In 1565, the Manila Galleon trade route opened between the Philippines and the port of Acapulco on the Pacific coast of New Spain. For the next 250 years, galleons crossed the Pacific — the only regular trans-oceanic trade route of the colonial era, running once or twice a year. They carried silk and spices east to Mexico and silver west to Manila. They also carried people.

Filipino sailors and laborers, many deserting the brutal conditions of galleon service, settled along Mexico’s Pacific coast — particularly in the state of Colima. They brought coconut palms with them. From the fermented sap of coconut flowers they made tuba. From tuba, distilled, they made lambanog — coconut liquor — using a still design that looked nothing like the European copper alembic. They used a hollowed log or clay chamber as the pot, with a condensation bowl filled with cold water suspended above it. Vapor rising from the heated ferment condensed against the cold bottom of the bowl and dripped into a collector. Simple. Portable. Easily improvised from local materials. Easily hidden from authorities.

In 1619, a Spanish cleric and historian named Domingo Lázaro de Arregui documented what he found in the coastal mountain regions of Nayarit. Indigenous populations were producing and drinking mexcales — a spirit obtained by distilling the juice of roasted agave. This was the first written record of mezcal.

The same year, a ship captain named Sebastián de Piñeda submitted a complaint to King Philip III: galleon crews were being depleted because Filipino sailors were deserting in Acapulco to work in Colima, where wine merchants specifically valued their expertise in distilling vino de coco. Two documents, read together. Filipino still technology meeting indigenous agave knowledge on the Pacific coast of New Spain. A new spirit, taking shape.

The colonial government’s response was immediate and repeated. Bans in 1585. Further legislation through the 17th century. Then in 1785, King Charles III issued a comprehensive ban on all alcohol production in New Spain — mezcal, pulque, everything — to protect imported Spanish wines and spirits. What happened next was not what he intended. Mezcaleros took their operations underground — literally. Agave piñas were roasted in earthen pits dug into the hillside to hide the smoke and the fire from colonial authorities. The underground pit roasting the Spanish prohibition forced on them became the defining characteristic of the spirit. Every traditionally made mezcal carries the smokiness of that suppression. The flavor in the glass is the direct inheritance of colonial prohibition.

The word mezcal is Nahuatl. Mexcalli — oven-cooked agave. The people who named it gave it a name in their own language, for a process that arrived from outside their world.

Mezcal is genuinely ancient and genuinely colonial at the same time. The agave plant — its identification, its cultivation across hundreds of varieties, the deep knowledge of its sugar cycle, the practice of roasting its core in the earth — this is pre-Columbian knowledge, developed over millennia in Mesoamerica. The fermentation knowledge — the wild yeasts, the open vats, the instinct for when a mash is ready — this is pre-Columbian knowledge. The distillation technology — the still, the concept of separating ethanol from water by exploiting the difference in their boiling points — arrived in the 16th century from the Philippines via the Manila Galleon trade, adapted from coconut liquor production by indigenous communities who understood the gave in ways the Filipinos and Spanish did not.

None of these three elements alone produces mezcal. Without the pre-Columbian botanical knowledge, there’s nothing to harvest. Without the fermentation knowledge, there’s no alcohol to distill. Without the distillation technology, there’s no spirit — there’s only pulque, perishable, local, tied to where it’s made.

Remove any one leg and the thing collapses.

To be clear, the meeting that produced mezcal was not voluntary. The Spanish conquest involved mass death, forced labor, and the systematic destruction of indigenous culture. The burning of codices, the dismantling of cities, the erasure of languages and cosmologies that had developed over thousands of years. Pulque was simultaneously exploited for tax revenue and demonized as a marker of indigenous degeneracy. The Filipino sailors who carried the still technology to Colima were deserters from forced maritime labor. The indigenous communities who adapted that technology to agave did so in the shadow of a colonial system designed to extract from them and suppress them.

However, the drink that emerged from that collision is not diminished by this history. It is defined by it.

Traditional is not the wrong word for mezcal, just an incomplete one.

The agave the jimador harvested this morning was twenty-five years old. The one growing beside it, which nobody will touch for another decade, is fifteen. The Tepeztate on the cliff above — the one that needs thirty-five years — was planted when the mezcalero’s grandfather was a young man.

Unfortunately, the global mezcal market does not operate on this timeline.

Between 2010 and 2022, mezcal exports from Mexico increased by more than 600 percent. The United States became the primary destination. Bars in every major city put mezcal on their menu as a premium spirit with a story. The story sold. The volume followed. And the wild agave — the Tepeztate, the Tobalá, the Jabalí, varieties that cannot be meaningfully cultivated, that only grow in specific microclimates at specific altitudes — began disappearing faster than it could regenerate.

A Tepeztate harvested today will not be replaced for thirty-five years. The quiote’s flowers feed endangered lesser long-nosed bats. They are critical pollinators that have evolved over millennia around a plant that flowers once every three decades. A harvest that preempts the quiote removes a food source from an ecosystem that has built itself around a thirty-five-year cycle. The craft spirits market operates on quarterly revenue. The agave operates on its own clock, indifferent to both.

In 1994, the Mexican government established a Protected Designation of Origin for mezcal. Nine states. Specific production standards. Official certification through the Consejo Regulador del Mezcal. The intention was protection and regulation. The result was more complicated. Many traditional palenqueros — the rural, multi-generational distillers whose families have been making mezcal for centuries — cannot afford the certification costs. Cannot alter their inherited methods to meet the CRM’s standardized parameters. They label their product destilado de agave instead of mezcal and watch the certified, regulated version of their ancestral practice sell for forty dollars a pour in cities they’ve never visited, to people who have never seen a maguey plant growing in the ground.

Meanwhile, pulque is coming back. After a century of marginalization — the beer industry’s smear campaigns in the early 20th century, the deliberate association of pulque with poverty and indigenous identity in a colonial culture that taught those associations as shame — pulque is recovering. Young people in Mexico City drink it in pulquerías. It has acquired the cachet of the authentic, the local, the pre-colonial. A drink that was deliberately marginalized is being reclaimed by the generation that inherited the marginalization.

Underneath all of this — the mezcal boom, the PDO, the overharvesting, the pulque revival, the ongoing argument about what traditional means and who gets to define it — the agave plant is still there. It was there before the Aztec Empire built its cosmological architecture around it. It was there when the Manila Galleons crossed the Pacific and the still technology arrived in Colima. It was there when the 1785 ban drove production into earthen pits and gave mezcal its smoke. It survived all of it.

It’s still accumulating fructans in the dark. Still waiting for the right moment to flower. Still being read, before dawn, by a jimador who learned to read it from his father, who learned it from his.

The drink in the copita is ancient and colonial and contested and alive. All of those things, in the same glass, at the same time.

Mexcalli. Oven-cooked agave. A Nahuatl word for something that existed long before anyone had a word for it. The plant that word belongs to has been growing in this soil longer than the word, longer than the language, longer than any of the civilizations that fought over what to call it, but it doesn't know that. It just grows.

DISTILLATE is a production of The Alchemist's Bar — craft mixology through the lens of alchemy as chemistry — and part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes every Tuesday at 6:00 AM Central.