Raicilla Journal

I spent two November days with Esteban Morales Garibi in up-country Jalisco. Garibi is a Guadalajara
restaurateur with a deep interest in the local mezcal called raicilla. We visited four artisan family destilerias he
buys from for export (as Los Danzantes does for Alipus). Garibi’s brand is La Venenosa.

The agaves used are silvestran (wild), especially the maximiliana. Some piñas are huge, 100 kilos or more. The
ancestral methods are very much alive, including the use of a still derived from Filipino prototypes introduced
after the Conquest via Puerto Vallarta (see Henry Bruner, Early Alcohol in Mexico, which contains a photograph
of an early still cut into a block of stone).

The following uses photos taken by Garibi and by Linda Newton as we visited the backyard destileria of Don Luis
Contreras in the Sierra Negra.

Here’s the horno, the wood-fired roasting pit. Once roasted, the cut-up agaves are crushed by hand in a wooden
pit, using mazos, long wooden pounders. The crushed agaves are transferred to a shallow concrete pit for
fermentation (with ambient native yeasts)

Don Luis uses four stills. Each still has three principal elements: the pot, the condensing chamber, and the
copper condensing bowl. The bottom element is a clay pot embedded in a wood-fired stone oven.

Above the pot is the second element, a more or less cylindrical clay condensing chamber open at the bottom
and top. It stands on top of the bottom pot: the photo shows Don Luis’ wife sealing the space between the two clay
elements, using distillation residue and wet clay.

In the upper opening of the condensing chamber sits a shallow copper bowl with a slightly rounded bottom.
Inside, the chamber has a lip protruding from its inner surface which supports a large segment of agave spear
which catches the drops falling from the bowl’s bottom and drains the liquid into a bamboo tube; the tube exits
through the side of the still.

The crushed and fermented agave liquid including the solids is wheelbarrowed over from the fermenting pit and
loaded into the bottom clay pot; when the pot is full, the condensing chamber is emplaced above it.

Heat from the wood fire in the oven brings the fermented agave liquid and solids to a boil. Steam, including
vapor from the alcohol, rises into the upper element (the condensing chamber) and condenses into droplets on
the bottom of the cool copper bowl. The distiller constantly adds cold water to the bowl to keep it cool, so that
condensation happens readily. Condensed distillate from the underside of the copper bowl falls onto the agave
spear inside the condensing chamber and is carried by the bamboo tube through the pot wall onto an agave
spear and then into a small ceramic pot.

In its basics, the method has not changed for more than 2000 years. The technical name for a potstill is “alambic”
coming from ancient Greek through Arabic; the ancient Greek root is ambyx, meaning a saucer. Get it? = the
copper dish on top of Don Luis’ still (except the Greeks turned the saucer upside down over the pot and collected
drops falling from the saucer’s rim). The word ambyx came from Egypt, which is likely where the Greeks learned
to distill. I was watching someone doing more or less exactly what some 380 BC Greek physician, or even some
priest in Thebes in 1500 BC, would have done to concentrate an infusion for a dose of herbal medicine.

This is not Colonial Willamsburg: “Wow look at this weird old way of doing things”. Don Luis’ process has real-time value and meaning: agaves distilled this way can be among the finest spirits being produced anywhere in the world. Hand-crushing leads to more complete fermentation; small stills make better product; clay gives the distillate a beautiful colloidal mouthfeel. Most importantly, the distiller, if he wants to make good stuff, is compelled to pay constant attention: in total touch at every moment with what’s going on inside his still.

There are plenty of careless distillers, and therefore plenty of indifferent mezcals, but the artisan process allows someone who really cares about what he’s making to produce a great spirit. The day before, I had visited a first-rate tequila distillery and tasted through some of their best stuff. The raicilla coming from Don Luis’ still was notably richer, more profound.

I was seeing first-hand where the elements of a modern potstill, say Germain-Robin’s old cognac stills, come from. The G-R stills have a pot; underneath is not a wood fire but a propane burner: both use open flames. The G-R stills have a “hat” and a “swan’s neck”; as with the upper element of the clay still, a significant amount of re-distillation (rectification) occurs as some of the steam condenses and falls back into the pot, enriching the end product. The GR condensing coils are simply a more efficient way of turning the distillation steam back into a liquid; here, modern is in certain ways better because you can more closely control the temperature of the exiting liquid and slow cooling in a coil/water bath is often superior to quick cooling. On the other hand, when Crispin Cain went to Oaxaca and distilled mezcal using a Hoga potstill with a large “hat” and controlling the condensation by adding ice to the bath surrounding the condensation coil, the resulting product was far more elegant but lacked the vegetal intensity of mezcal

Know what I liked best? I wasn’t watching someone do his job. I was watching someone living his life. His
grandchildren were there, growing up inside the process, the way he had, and his father before him. Don Luis
was on crutches from an automobile accident, so his wife was helping. You could tell she felt good about it, proud
of her contribution. Before Esteban Garibi, the customers who bought and drank the fruits of his labor were his
neighbors, his pueblo, the people he lives among. In his destileria is zero modern-day alienation of labor. His
time has not been monetized. When he (or any of the thousands of other back-country mezcaleros) says “I’m a
distiller”, he’s not talking about his job, he’s talking about his life, and you can taste that fact in the subtlety, high
quality, and individuality of his raicilla. People like Esteban Garibi – or like Max Garrone of Mezcalistas and
Hector Vasquez of Comunidad and Karina Abad of Los Danzantes – are so deeply engaged because they believe
in keeping this precious thing going, keeping it alive.