Oaxacan brothers living the "Mexican Dream" producing mezcal, as demand booms
Armando and Alvaro Hernandez are fourth-generation mezcal producers from Oaxaca, one of Mexico's poorest states.
In the 80s and 90s, when the Hernandez brothers were children, mezcal sold for 7 pesos a liter — less than a dollar a bottle — and could barely support the family.
"We were 10 children. Sunday was the only day we could afford a cup of milk and a piece of bread," Armando said. "So we decided to go."
Armando left home first at the age of 12, alone; a coyote smuggled him across the border to California. Alvaro joined him in Los Angeles a few years later and the two brothers worked as busboys in bars and restaurants.
When mezcal's popularity exploded and global demand for the spirit began to spike, Alvaro began to dream about returning to the family business in Oaxaca. Armando called him crazy, until he noticed shots of mezcal going for $10. Then he noticed the mezcal was coming from their hometown of Santiago Matatlán.
So the Hernandez brothers headed back across the border to ramp up the family distillery, or palenque. It paid off.
For years, mezcal sat in the shadow of its popular cousin tequila. The drink was deemed too smokey for a spot on the same shelf as premium spirits.
Now, mezcal is a half a billion dollar a year industry. Mexico's production of mezcal has increased 700% from 10 years ago. No other liquor has seen a greater increase in production in the past decade.
"It's the Mexican dream," Armando said in an interview. "It's something we never imagined."
How mezcal is made
Mezcal gets its name from the Aztec word for cooked agave, a thorny plant sacred to many in Mexico for thousands of years and first distilled here in the 1600s. The plant takes its sweet time to ripen, up to 30 years for some varieties. Agave plants used in the production of mezcal grow in the valleys that run between the Sierra Madre mountains in Oaxaca.
Mexicans have been drinking mezcal at baptisms, funerals and other occasions in between ever since. Tequila is actually a type of mezcal, distilled from blue agave, mostly in the state of Jalisco.
The difference is that most tequila has been mass produced, made by machines, since the 70s. Artisanal mezcal resists machinery.
Mezcaleros harvest agave year round, but it's no low-hanging fruit. Workers, called jimadores, pry the agave from the ground, cut away its spikes using a machete and reveal the heart – the piña — which looks like a 100-pound pineapple.
The Hernandez brothers learned the craft from their father, Silverio, and continue to make it by hand, exactly as they were taught.
"We make mezcal without hurry, meaning everything in its time," Armando said. "We don't add or do anything to speed up production."
Work continues all day, every day. After the agave plant is harvested, it is roasted in underground pits for days, then it's crushed by a horse-drawn mill. The mash is fermented in wooden barrels and distilled twice in copper vats. There are no temperature dials or controls; bubbles indicate the alcohol content.
The future of agave in Mexico
Mezcal producers across Oaxaca are facing a number of challenges as demand grows. Graciela Angeles Carreño, a mezcalera who runs the Real Minero palenque, worries about agave production. She explains that once you harvest agave, that's it.
"You can only benefit from it once in its lifetime and it takes 30 years to give you its best," she said.
Producers are trying to avoid repeating tequila's mistake. Monoculture of the blue agave used in the drink has rendered the plant more susceptible to disease.
"On the one hand we have economic success because this spirit that came from our community is now served in the most famous bars in the world. That makes me happy and proud as a Mexican and Oaxacan. What worries me is the environmental cost, the cultural cost. Because it will not be free," Angeles Carreño said. "So I think the crossroads right now is recognizing that we need to slow down a little."
Preserving the traditions of making mezcal
Tens of thousands of Oaxacan families produce mezcal for a living, mostly in small, handcrafted batches. The deeper you travel into Oaxaca's countryside, the harder mezcaleros cling to their ancestral methods and the louder they'll tell you: there's a price to pay for this mezcal boom.
At the Perez family palenque three hours south of Oaxaca City, Eleuterio "Tio Tello" and his son Lalo Perez are known for their exacting standards when it comes to the ripeness of the agave they harvest. They use some ancestral methods in their production, crushing roasted agave with wooden mallets.
But the mezcal made by the Perez family can't technically be called mezcal on the bottle. In Mexico, every bottle of certified mezcal is stamped by the government with a hologram to mark denomination of origin. The Perez family's mezcal is made in the right region and using the right methods to qualify for denomination of origin. But Lalo Perez said he doesn't bother with the bureaucracy of getting it certified by government-approved regulators.
Perez said he'd rather ditch the word mezcal than change his ancestral methods or adjust his family's recipe.
"To certify it, they practically tell you how to make your mezcal. An inspector comes and tells you, 'Don't crush with wooden mallets. Water it down, so that it will pass lab tests. And then I'll certify it so you can sell it,'" Perez said. "We don't need a government certifier to come and tell us how to make mezcal."
Perez said there's no doubt in his mind that the spirit his family produces is, in fact, mezcal. Nevertheless, Cinco Sentidos, the brand that bottles it for export, has to label the uncertified mezcal as "distilled agave".
Back at the Hernandez palenque
While some mezcaleros have resisted the Mexican government's denomination of origin stamp, the Hernandez brothers produce 3,000 certified bottles of mezcal a day — almost all of them for export — as part of a partnership with the brand Ilegal.
The top-selling brand was acquired last year by Bacardi, the world's largest privately held global spirits company, in a deal worth a reported $100 million.
"What's going to change is many people's lives in this community," Armando said. "It is a benefit for the whole community."
The Hernandez palenque now employs 100 people, including Armando and Alvaro's 87-year-old father. As the business grows, he said his sons' mezcal lives up to the family name.
"That's why I drink it," Armando translated for his father. "If not, I wouldn't drink it."