PECHUGA W R I T T E N B Y G A B E T O T H / / / I L L U S T R AT E D B Y A M A N D A J O Y C H R I S T E N S E N
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echuga is often associated with its most notorious ingredient: animal protein. (The name literally translates to “breast,” as in chicken breast.) Traditionally, poultry or rabbit is hung inside the still for vapor infusion, but meat is just one potential ingredient of a unique concoction that often includes whatever fruit, nuts and spices are local and available. “I think of pechuga as a special-occasion mezcal. You’re putting something different in for a celebration, something to set it apart,” says Dylan Sloan of Oaxaca’s Mezcal Vago. While pechuga is a centuries-old tradition with unverifiable origins, he attributes its repopularization — in Mexico, at least — to the tequila boom of the 1970s and ’80s. Before the boom, Oaxaca had been known for good mezcal, “and so people would come down to Oaxaca and go out to these little rural communities where people made their own booze, and would buy it up and then take it back with them to restaurants in Oaxaca or back to Mexico City or Guadalajara or wherever,” says Sloan. However, once tequila started to take off, it became more a part of Mexican identity, and mezcal quickly fell out of fashion. “All of a sudden tequila was everywhere and it was kind of cheap, and it just became something the city folk were proud of and thought was cool, whereas mezcal has always been the poor man's drink,” Sloan says. WWW.ARTISANSPIRITMAG.COM
It quickly began to impact the rural producers in remote farms and poor campesinos. The mescaleros were left with excessive amounts of mezcal once the buyers stopped showing up. Luckily the mezcal did not go to waste. That excess stock led to a “resurgence” in pechuga production, specifically for celebrations. “If you're sitting on a bunch of mezcal and everyone in your town has been drinking your mezcal for years anyway, and then your daughter is about to turn 15 and everyone's going to come over for the quinceanera, or a wedding …Well you want to put a little twist on it,” he says. Often that “something different” would include chicken, fruit, spices, nuts, or whatever was fresh and available. Sloan says, “It is about locally specific [ingredients]. And some people use animals and some people don’t.” In the case of Mezcal Vago’s Elote, the mescalero simply tweaks the spirit with some toasted corn, rather than a complex cocktail of additions. He used to distill the mezcal twice before macerating the corn and distilling it a third time — a tradition that could hearken back to a time when producers were looking for something to do with already-finished mezcal. Now he macerates the corn in low wines and finds that two distillations leaves more character
in the spirit. “Our main producer never used chickens and quite frankly doesn't really like the way it affects the flavor,” Sloan says. “His idea was just to use toasted corn because he's already growing corn. Everyone grows corn in rural Oaxaca.” In thinking about corn, many people immediately jump to thoughts of bourbon, but Sloan notes that the corn sugar never converts or ferments, it simply infuses into the low wines. “Any residual sugar, color or strong flavors drop out and what's left is a really subtle corn maceration. This is indigenous Mesoamerican corn, heirloom corn."
MEXICO VIA MARYLAND Naturally, the siren song of a unique type of spirit that reflects locals flavors, or at least local tastes, has been irresistible to a small group of craft distillers in the United States. The Baltimore Whiskey Company has doubled down on their love of both mezcal and pechuga with Maryland-ized versions. “We do a smoked apple brandy that we distill like a mezcal, that really drinks a lot like a mezcal. It’s a really cool spirit,” co-founder Max Lents says. “We're super nerdy about spirits and we kind of have a wide breadth of what we really enjoy, but we do drink our fair share of mezcal.” Lents and his team follow in the tradition of collecting through the tails. Rather than making a cut and proofing with water, he continues to collect the spirit and uses the tails to bring it down to proof. “A lot of the really heavy smoke phenols don't come out
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