palenque de maestro mezcalero Félix Ángeles

This week I visited my first palenque*. Eric at this point has been to several palenques, and this was his 2nd trip to this same palanque- that of Maestro Félix Ángeles Arrellanes and his family. At least three generations of this family has been making mezcal here, in the town of Santa Catarina Minas, which is quite famed for its high quality mezcal. Maestro Félix Ángeles is further renowned because of his wonderful pechugas and ensambles and high quality mezcales in general. What are pechugas, you might ask. Especially if you know that "pechuga" refers to (chicken or turkey) breast... what could that have to do with mezcal? Well, in fact, various fruits are added to distilled mezcal and chicken (or turkey...or other animals, depending on tradition) is suspended over the mezcal and it is distilled again-- so the mezcal basically gets distilled through the meat. This is an ancient recipe that has become quite popular again, it makes a really quite wonderful mezcal. Maestro Félix Ángeles makes as many as three different pechugas, which is highly unusual- not all mezcaleros make pechugas and those that do usually don't make more than one! Félix Ángeles' ensambles are also really great-- an ensamble is the fancy word for how mezcal was usually made in the past-- using a mix of agave (maguey) varieties, not single-varietal as is in fashion among hipster American drinkers these days. In an ensamble, all the varieties are together for the entire process- cooking, mashing, fermenting, distilling- it's not that the varieties are distilled separately and then mixed at the end, an ensamble starts as a ensamble and goes all the way through as one. Anyway, I don't know nearly as much about this whole process as Eric does. Maybe I'll get him to write more...
*palenque is the Oaxaqueño term for a mezcal distillery. 

But I did take lots of fotos at the palenque! Por supuesto...

Here's some fotos of the harvested piñas, piled up and waiting to go into the oven. "Piña" is the term for the heart of the maguey plant- this, not the "juice" or "sap" of the maguey, is what is used to make mezcal. 

A not great foto of the earthen, conical oven used by the familia for baking the piñas  ,

Not counting industrial mezcal, there are two ways to crush the piñas after they've been baked, either by hand using hand tools or by using a horse to pull a stone that crushes the piñas (like a mill sort of). Maestro Féliz Ángeles' family does it by hand-- using these very heavy mallet type things called mazos (I can barely lift one of these). This crushing of the baked maguey makes it more "bio-available" for fermentation. (although some fermenting happens while the baked piñas are resting for a couple of days before getting mashed up)

The crushed agave is now ready to ferment! 

this is what the future mezcal looks like in the fermentation tank-- fiborous and pulpy. All natural, wild fermentation, no yeast is added by the mezcalero, just what is in the environment- air, surface of tanks, etc

The fermentation tanks are really large. Lying on top of this one are a couple of river reeds which are used for sampling the tepache to see if it's ready to move on to distillation. The tepache is also stirred until a good fermentation cap is created.

 

The tepache in this fermentation tank (wooden barrel) is farther along and has a fermentation "cap"

Closer up view of the fermentation tank from above, you can see it has a tiny cross- this is for blessing the mezcal as well as for reminding mezcaleros not to mix/stir this batch anymore. The agave leaf sitting next to the cross is actually used in the distillation process, to filter the distillate out of the pot.

Now on to the distillation! The tradition in this family (& Sta Catarina Minas in general) is to distill using clay pots (other pueblos use copper) and to do two distillations (except for pechugas which get 3 distillations). One clay pot is buried in the oven with another clay pot on top and then a copper bowl on top that the water goes into that creates the condensate/distallate.

Here's the four stills of this palenque. The one in the foreground is the only one where distilliation was actively happening on this particular occasion, you can't see the clay pot inside the oven, just the clay pot sitting on top and the copper piece that has water going into it,

Here you can get a sense of how the pots sit one on top of the other (the tepache goes in the lower pot that sits inside the oven), the pots are sealed together with some of that fermentation cap gunk and bits of fiber from the fermentation,

This is the 3rd distillation of the pechuga they were making and so was relatively unattended (all of it gets distilled as opposed to the 2nd distillation when the heads and tails are removed), 

This is a foto of the dried out pechugas that were inside the pot to allow the distillate to pass through it on the way to condensation. In a pechuga distillation, the distillate also has a number of fruits and spices added to it in a pechuga distillation, the recipe is particular to the family,

Stoking the fire of the oven. Lots of smoke in the palenque also makes fotos a challenge!!! ja!

After the first distillation the leftover maguey fibers, etc. need to be removed from the clay pot. Now, one of the disadvantages of clay pot distillation is that the clay pots are fairly fragile. So you can't just a regular shovel or pitch fork to scoop out the stuff. Instead they use these wooden, tree-branch pitchforks. If you look closely you can see they are also made with fermentation cap gunk and ixtle (fiber of the agave pencas aka leaves). Very little of the agave plant is wasted!!

 

A more detailed look at the distillation set-up with the river reed leaving the pot and filtering into big plastic gasoline-type containers.

 

The clay pots eventually get too old to use anymore-- here are three old ones sitting in the sun. I loved the texture, shape, the capture of the sunlight...

 

El Maestro Mezcalero, Félix Ángeles Arellanes himself,

And then of course there is the tasting room part of the palenque! Basically a room filled with plastic containers and glass garrafones, all filled with a different mezcal. The mezcalero pours out a large jicara full of mezcal and that gets passed around for everyone to taste and then you can buy a liter of whatever you want (one brings one's own liter bottles). Félix Ángeles sells most of his mezcal this way- directly to consumers, whether they be people in his pueblo, other Oaxaqueños, or extranjeros who come to visit. Other mezcaleros sell to an export company, which is who bottles, labels, and sells the mezcal (a bit different from how other alcoholic beverages work, business-wise). Some mezcaleros make some of their mezcal for export companies and some for themselves and local consumption. It varies a lot, I gather.

Maestro Félix Ángeles with the jicara he pours the tasting sample of mezcal into,

Pouring out a mezcal for tasting. In this picture, you can see 11-12 different mezcals. This is a small fraction of what's in the tasting room!!!! We tried about 15 this trip (a sip or two of each),

Eric and the Maestro in the palenque (fermenters to the left of them, distillation behind, to the right)