Mezcal Don Amado Arroqueno

Arroqueño is the giant of the wild agaves — Agave americana, fifteen to twenty-five years to mature — and Don Amado distills it in clay, the way Santa Catarina Minas has for five centuries. Eleven generations of the Arellanes family have made mezcal in the village since the late 1700s, and it's the standard-bearer of the ollas de barro tradition: small ceramic pot stills with bamboo tubing that give mezcal an earthy, mineral softness copper can't. The Arroqueño is wild-harvested highland agave roasted in a wood-burning earthen pit, crushed and fermented with its fibers, and double-distilled in ceramic-and-bamboo pot stills by maestro Germán Bonifacio Arellanes — distilled up to 53% and brought to 46% ABV with distilled water, a Minas practice that Del Mezcal notes excludes the tails. Mezcal Reviews: spice, pepper, and chili on the nose, well balanced with a good deal of smoky, earthy flavor, very soft and easy to drink at 46% — a great agave from a reputable palenque — with the honest caveat that one taster found the clay so forward it overtook the arroqueño. Expect green melon, cooked agave, cinnamon, and dried herbs under a deep, earthy clay funk, dense and soft, finishing long. Honest note: a wild agave with two decades of growth, in clay, from one family — priced for it, and unmistakably Minas. Neat, in a copita, slowly.

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