Tasting blind is an entirely different experience
We’re always working on new projects and this year’s Mexico in a Bottle San Francisco meant that we had an amazing confluence of the mezcal world in San Francisco and it was the launch of the Mezcal Collaborative so we decided to set up a blind tasting to spark conversation and bring agave aficionados together. read more…
Can’t get enough of a whole week of mezcal
Alas, Mezcal Week 2018 is in the books. Yet another year of amazing tastings embedded in an excuse to get out there and appreciate the amazing variety of Mexico’s national spirits. read more…
Five years and still growing
This past Sunday Mexico in a Bottle had its fifth birthday in San Francisco with more than forty brands, more than two hundred expressions of mezcal (plus some tequilas, rums, and other Mexican spirits), great food from local restaurants, and cocktails. Let’s not forget about the art, the music, the tiendita, the symposia, and the fun! read more…
Mezcal Week 2018 is here!
It’s the week we’ve all been waiting for, Mezcal Week 2018, That one week where bars and restaurants put mezcal front and center in flights, cocktails, meals, and screenings. The goal is to highlight our favorite Mexican spirit in all its variety and our participants never disappoint. There are far too many to mention, check our home page for the full listing, but a few highlights from this year to get you excited! read more…
How to manage mezcal tasting notes
-
- The Mezcalistas Mezcal Tasting Journal
-
- An interior page of the Mezcalistas Mezcal Tasting Journal.
-
- The back cover of the Mezcalistas Mezcal Tasting Journal.
When we started selling the Mezcal Tasting Journals we weren’t exactly sure how they’d be received. We certainly love them and have been using them for all our tastings ever since Tess Rose Lampert showed them to us. She’d developed the format along with Portland’s 33 Books Co. which has a number of other tasting journals.
One of the things that I liked immediately about the format is read more…
An adobe brick building brigade
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to talk to Richard Betts of Sombra Mezcal about the company’s foray into making adobe bricks from mezcal by-product. The idea is pretty simple, use viñaza and bagasso from mezcal production to make adobe bricks. Of course simplicity is never easy, and after much trial and error, they created a solid blueprint that others could use. read more…
When does a mezcal deserve to be a mezcal?
Is it really mezcal?
What is a mezcal? Who can label their bottles with the word “mezcal”? Those are the existential questions that bedevil this industry. For a second there we thought that they were more or less settled, even if you didn’t like the result, with NOM 70 this past spring. But now a new struggle has emerged between one faction that argues that the term should be applied to those who have a claim to tradition. But the profound irony of their stance is that “mezcal”, per the new NOM definition, now means less ‘traditional product’ than ‘anything goes.’ read more…
Growing pains and new initiatives
Mezcalistas, like everyone else in the mezcal business, is experiencing its own share of growing pains. Limited resources (it’s a 2.5 person shop) and capital constraints (bootstrapping all we do) come smack up against all we want to do for the category, all the time. It’s simultaneously painful and euphoric to be in this place of so much possibility and so much work. read more…
Is Teslaquila a disruptor?
Just when you think you’ve reached peak tequila along comes this Teslaquila story to blow all your assumptions out of the water. The latest chapter was Elon Musk’s October 12th tweet:
Visual approximation pic.twitter.com/sMn3Pv476Y
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2018
Last year we had that billion dollar (actually $700 million up front with sweeteners which make it worth more than a billion if the brand performs over the next ten years, but who’s counting!) read more…
Transparency in mezcal (and quality too) – Vago’s Sierra Negra story
A close up of Mezcal Vago’s limited edition Sierra Negra bottle.
Vago’s latest release, an incredibly small batch of Sierra Negra by Aquilino Garcia Lopez highlights smart and ethical behavior in the mezcal world. Each bottle that Vago releases is accompanied by a blog post that includes a highly detailed tech sheet that delves into everything you’d want to know about the bottle, the agaves and processes that produced it, and the people who made it. Dig into that, spend some time with it, think it over. All that information helps you put the scope of work that brought that bottle to you into perspective. read more…
Mezcal Tasting Journals
The Mezcalistas Mezcal Tasting Journal!