For a while now, chef/owner Armando Gonzalez of Amerikas in neighboring Oak Park has offered mezcal made in conjunction with Prolijo, an award-winning maker of the spirit; we’ve tried it, and we liked it: herbaceous, lightly smoky and silky.
This coming spring, Gonzalez will again be working with Prolijo to launch a new mezcal, Oaxaco, a name derived from his home state of Oaxaca, the Mexican state best known for producing mezcal.
Mezcal, though not as well-known as tequila, is gaining in popularity; in fact, it’s currently one of the fastest growing spirits in the United States. There are reasons for this popularity in the U.S. and elsewhere, but chief among those reasons, at least for me, is that mezcal offers more flavors.
Mezcal and tequila are both made from the agave plant, but mezcal expresses flavors not available to tequila. That’s because by federal regulation, mezcal can be made from dozens of different agave plants, whereas tequila can technically be made only from Blue Weber agave, thus limiting tequila’s taste range. Oaxaco, Amerika’s new mezcal, will be a blend of espadín along with two other agave varieties, arroqueño and tepextate, which means that each bottle will deliver a whole lot of flavors you won’t find in tequila.
Mezcal is also better suited to reflecting the many tastes of the terroir, the place where it grew. One of the reasons mezcal mirrors the land so well is that it takes a long time for agave plants to grow to maturity; with espadín, it can take up to eight years for the agave plant to mature. During all that time in the ground, the plant is absorbing the flavors of the Mexican countryside. In contrast, consider that scotch and bourbon – one mostly barley, the other mostly corn – leverages the flavors of plants that live and die within one single season.
“Artisanal” is a buzzword, sometimes meaningless, but the Amerika’s mezcal is truly artisanal, produced using the traditional, handcrafted ways. Agave hearts are trimmed with a machete and cooked in huge outdoor pits to develop sugars that will be converted to alcohol during fermentation.
In larger commercial operations, the agave hearts may be put through something like a wood-chipper before going into the fermentation tanks. Amerikas’ mezcal, however, uses a traditional technique: agave hearts are crushed using a tahona, a large cement wheel pulled by a horse or burro. In a 2017 Chicago Tribune article, I explained that grinding agave, like grinding herbs, releases flavors in ways that just don’t happen when you chop them up; for the same reason, you “mull” ingredients for a cocktail: smashing them releases flavors that won’t be released if you simply cut them up.
“I have mezcal in my blood,” chef Gonzalez told us.
On your next trip to Amerikas, try to make sure you have some of their mezcal in your glass.
