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With the rising recognition of tequila and mezcal within the U.S., a brand new era of growers and distillers within the Southwest is making an attempt to create a uniquely American agave liquor.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Gross sales of tequila and mezcal have greater than tripled within the U.S. within the final decade. No surprise growers and distillers of – within the American Southwest are arduous at work planting the spiky agave crops used to make them. John Burnett has the story.
JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: Agave crops thrive within the arid local weather and sensible sunshine of Texas. Could not you harvest them and distill a Lone Star mezcal?
LEONARDO SANCHEZ: I’m Leonardo Sanchez. I’m co-founder of Ancestral Craft Spirits.
BURNETT: We’re standing in a clearing not removed from the muddy Rio Grande and the border city of Roma, Texas. It is hotter than Hades. A few years in the past, Sanchez and his associate planted 2,500 sharp-tipped agaves down right here. What occurred subsequent didn’t bode properly for the way forward for the primary Texas mezcal.
SANCHEZ: We got here again someday, and what we discovered is that there is numerous hawks and javelinas on this space, and so they like numerous these little crops. In order that they ate hundreds of them on the finish of the day.
BURNETT: So the Texas wild hogs destroyed your Mexican agaves.
SANCHEZ: Yeah, precisely.
BURNETT: Sanchez persevered. He introduced extra child Agaves from his native Mexico and put them in a plant nursery. As soon as he places them within the floor and erects a hog-proof fence, it’s going to take at the least seven years for them to mature. Mexican distillers have been making tequila and its smoky cousin mezcal for greater than 400 years. Like Champagne from France, it has to come back from Mexico if it is known as tequila or mezcal. If it is made wherever else, it is known as an agave spirit. Whereas his agaves are rising, Sanchez is importing agave juice from Oaxaca, Mexico, distilling and bottling it in Roma. This is the story about the way it bought its model title – Blasfemus.
SANCHEZ: Eduardo, my associate, was sitting within the board of the Mexican firm that makes the mezcal. And he was telling them, we have now finished some particular editions – (non-English language spoken), so why do not we do a particular version Tejas? And one of many board members informed him that might be a blasphemy.
BURNETT: And that is how the primary Texas mezcal, Blasfemus, happened. However Texas was not the primary. Californians have been rising and distilling agave for practically a decade. On the West Coast, they do not have to fret about feral pigs. For them, the problem is discovering the proper agave varieties that may face up to the chilly, moist climate within the northern a part of the state. Craig Reynolds is president of the California Agave Council, with 50 members. He says everybody focuses on the downsides of local weather change.
CRAIG REYNOLDS: However local weather change additionally creates alternatives, significantly in agriculture.
BURNETT: Reynolds says as California winters get hotter…
REYNOLDS: Different crops develop into extra fascinating, and agave is one in every of them.
BURNETT: However how does it style? I introduced some samples of Blasfemus to a pair of veteran bartenders in Brownsville, Juan Flores of Terras and Chris Galicia of Las Ramblas.
Cheers.
(LAUGHTER)
BURNETT: They sniffed it and sloshed it round their palates.
CHRIS GALICIA: It smells candy.
JUAN FLORES: Quite a lot of spice to it, too.
GALICIA: Like, it smells like apple pie for some cause. Is that simply me?
FLORES: No, really…
BURNETT: I requested Galicia how Texas-made mezcal compares to conventional Oaxacan mezcal.
GALICIA: As traditionalists, I do not suppose we might essentially drink this, However you recognize, anyone who’s barely moving into the class – it is positively proper up your alley. I believe issues like this are good for a rising market, and it has a spot on the again bar.
BURNETT: American agave is in its infancy. Fifty years in the past, Texas confirmed skeptics that it may make wine. At present, the Texas wine business has an affect of $20 billion. With tequila and mezcal now outselling American whiskey, the brand new agave entrepreneurs hope there’s room for a made-in-America agave spirit. John Burnett, Roma, Texas.
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