Pulque - this is a fermented liquor made from the heart of the agave plant, first discovered by ancient Indian civilizations, and of no small religious use, and the prototype on which all tequilas are based. Because it is not distilled to a high alcohol content, it is still brewed in many parts of Mexico.
zcal - Mezcal can actually be said to be all the agave grass heart as raw material, the manufacture of distilled spirits of the general term, simply put Tequila can be said to be a kind of Mezcal, but not all of the Mezcal can be called Tequila. In the beginning, Mezcal had a wider range and less rigorous regulations than Tequila, but in recent years Mezcal has come to have a more definitive product specification in order to gain a higher status of acceptance, and to rival Tequila.
Tequila - Tequila is the pinnacle of the tequila family, and only products made from a plant called blue agave in certain regions qualify for the name.
There are also other types of alcohol made from agave, such as Sotol, produced in Chihuahua. This type of liquor is usually a more regional product and not very well known. [Ingredients Agave (also known as maguey in Mexico) is a specialized plant native to Mexico, and although it is often thought of as a cactus, its origins are closer to those of the lily of the valley (Amaryllis). The agave has a large stem, known locally as the heart of the agave (Pi?a), which looks very much like a giant pineapple, and has a juicy, sugar-rich interior that makes it ideal for fermenting wine. (See photo.) Long before Europeans discovered the New World, local Indian civilizations knew the technique of brewing alcohol from agave juice (also known as pulque), and the distilled spirit made from this fermented spirit is called mezcal.
Tequila is strictly limited to the finest of the 136 varieties of agave. Blue Agave. This is mainly grown in the highlands and mountainous regions of the state of Jalisco at an altitude of more than 1,500 meters of the species, was first named by the German botanist Franz Weber (Franz Weber) in 1905 when the classification, and therefore received the scientific name of Agave tequilana weber azul. According to the law, only tequilas that use blue agave as an ingredient in the permitted areas are eligible to be marketed under the name Tequila. By definition, Tequila is also a type of Mezcal, similar to the status of Cognac for all French brandies. [History Although there is an Indian legend that tequila was created when a god struck the agave growing on a hillside with lightning, there is little basis for this claim. Instead, the legend tells us that agave was seen as a very divine plant, a gift from the gods in the sky, back in the days of the ancient Indian civilization.
As early as the third century A.D., the Indian civilization living in the Central American region had long discovered the technology of fermentation and brewing, and they used any available source of sugar in their lives to make alcohol. In addition to their main crop of corn, and the common local palm sap, the sugar content of agave, which is not low and juicy, has naturally become the raw material for making alcohol. The fermented agave juice is often used for religious purposes. In addition to helping the priests to communicate with the gods (which is actually a drunkenness or hallucination that occurs after drinking), they would let the victims drink the pulque before sacrificing the living to make them unconscious or at least less capable of resisting, thus facilitating the rituals.
Tequila remained a purely fermented spirit until the Conquistadors from across the Atlantic, in Spain, brought distillation to the New World. The Spaniards were looking for a suitable local ingredient to replace the wines or other European spirits that they had costly brought from their homeland and which were difficult to replenish in sufficient quantities to satisfy their enormous consumption. They looked to pulque, with its peculiar botanical flavors, but, suspecting that the alcohol content of this fermented spirit was much lower than that of wine, they attempted to increase the alcohol content of pulque by means of distillation, resulting in a distilled spirit made from agave. Since this new product was intended to replace the use of wine, it acquired the name Mezcal wine.
The prototype of Meal wine took a long time to evolve into the Mezcal/Tequila we see today, and during this evolution it was often given many different names, Mezcal brandy, Agave wine, Mezcal tequila, and finally the Tequila we know today. Tequila as we know it today - a name obviously taken from the name of the town where it was produced. It is interesting to note that José Cuervo, the grandfather of tequila's commercial production, named his product Agave brandy when he won a prize at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, at a time when almost all distilled spirits were called brandy, such as Gin Brandy. [edit paragraph] The main origin Whether Tequila or other agave-based alcohol, are the Mexican country's original alcohol, of which Tequila is the country's important export commodities and economic pillars, and therefore subject to extremely strict government regulations to limit and protect to ensure product quality.
While the origin of the name Tequila is a mystery, the main production area for the wine, whether it's the mountains, the towns, or the wine itself, all share the same name, with the center of production being the small town of Tepic, between Guadalajara and Tepic, in the Mexican state of Jalisco. The small town of Tequila is the center of production in Jalisco, Mexico, between Guadalajara and Tepic, and legend has it that the earliest source of this wine was the slopes around the caldera of the same name on the outskirts of the town.
At one point, Tequila was only allowed to be produced in the state of Jalisco, but in 1977 the Mexican government slightly amended the decree to relax the restrictions on Tequila's origin, allowing it to be produced in some of the autonomous municipios of the surrounding states, as shown in the accompanying table. Interestingly, despite the decades-long relaxation, there are only two licensed distilleries outside of Jalisco: La Gonzale?a (under the brand name Chinaco) in Tamaulipas and Tequilera Corralejo in Guanajuato.
Tequila is produced in a number of municipios in the surrounding states. /p>
Legal origin of tequila
Guanajuato Abasolo Cuerámaro Huanimaro Manuel Doblado Pénjamo Purísima del Rincón Romita Nayarit Ahuacatlán Amatlán de Ca? as Ixtlán del Rio Jala Xalisco San Pedro Lagunillas Santa María del Oro Tepic Tamaulipas Aldama Altamira Antiguo Morelos Gómez Farías Gonzalez Llera Mante El Nuevo Morelos Ocampo Tula XicoténcatlJaliscoMichohacán Abasolo Cuerámaro Huanimaro Manuel Doblado Pénjamo Purísima del Rincón Romita[edit ]Process of preparation The agave plant takes ten to twelve years to mature, and its gray-blue leaves can sometimes be up to ten feet long. When mature, they look like giant tulips.
Tequila makers cut off the outer leaves and take the center of the pinal, a spiny fruit that resembles a giant pineapple, weighing up to 150 pounds and filled with sweet, sticky juice. It is then steamed in an oven, which concentrates the sweet juice and converts the starch into sugar.
The cooked pina is then sent to another machine to be squeezed into juice for fermentation.
The fermentation of the juice reaches 80 degrees of alcohol and distillation begins.
Tequila in the copper single-type distillation in the distillation of the second, not after the barrel maturation of alcohol, transparent and colorless, known as WhiteTequila, the taste is more choking; the other kind of Gold Tequila, because of the light amber color of the name, usually in oak barrels at least a certain amount of storage, the taste is similar to brandy.
Planting
In contrast to the ingredients often used in other liquors, such as grains and fruits, tequila uses a very specific and exotic source of sugar - the sugar contained in the sap of the agave grass heart (bulb). Of the several tequilas, Tequila uses the sap of the blue agave, which has an average growth period of eight to 14 years, depending on the soil, climate and farming practices, compared to the other agave varieties used in Mezcal, which generally have shorter growth periods than the blue agave.
In addition to the variety, the quality of agave grass often depends on its size as well, with the larger it grows the better the price. Crops grown in the agave fields located on the slopes of the extinct crater outside of the town of Tequila are generally considered to be of superior quality, and products made in small quantities from these high-quality agave grasses are generally rated higher than those made by the larger producers concentrated near the town. According to regulations, a spirit qualifies as Tequila if more than 51% of the raw materials used are from blue agave, with the lesser amount of raw materials replaced by the addition of other types of sugar (usually cane sugar derived from sugar cane), called Mixto. some Mixto is sold in full barrels shipped in foreign packages that are not regulated by Mexican law, however, the regulations However, regulations state that only products that use 100 percent blue agave as an ingredient are eligible to be sold in Mexico with a label stating "100 percent Blue Agave".
Today in Mexico, the blue agave used to make Tequila is grown artificially as a crop. Although agave was originally a plant that used bats to pass on its seeds, in practice it is planted before the rainy season using young twigs taken from four- to six-year-old mother plants, at an average density of between 1,000 and 2,000 plants per acre.
Once planted, agave takes at least eight years to harvest, one of the longest waits for an alcohol plant. Some distilleries that emphasize quality even go so far as to allow agave to grow for up to 12 years before harvesting, because the longer the plant grows, the more sugar it contains that can be used for fermentation. Plants that are close to harvest are pre-caned for their leafy parts in order to stimulate the ripening effect of the plant. While some growers fertilize and de-worm their plants as they grow, the Campos de agave do not require any irrigation at all, because experiments have found that while artificial irrigation makes the agave grow larger, it does not increase its sugar content, and that all the water it needs to grow comes from the precipitation that falls each year during the rainy season.
Harvesting
Planting and harvesting agave is a very traditional skill, with some growers passing on the knowledge through a hereditary system known as Jimador, as the "heart" of the agave, which originally started out in the ground and slowly broke through the soil, will grow into a towering flower stalk (Quixotl) as the plant reaches adulthood. As the plant reaches adulthood, it develops towering flower stems (Quixotl, which can sometimes exceed 5 meters in height) that consume a lot of the sugar in the heart, so it is part of the Jimador's job to cut them down in a timely manner.
To harvest, Jimador removes the long leaves, often hundreds of them, from the heart of the agave, and then cuts the pineapple-shaped fleshy stems from the branches. The heart usually weighs between 80 and 300 pounds (35 to 135 kilograms), and for some rare varieties that grow on high ground, it can weigh more than 500 pounds (200 kilograms). A skilled Jimador can harvest more than a ton of agave hearts a day, and once inside the distillery, the material is usually cut into four pieces to facilitate further cooking. Because the agave needs to be at different levels of maturity, harvesting can continue throughout the year, with some distilleries using younger agave for their spirits, but established distilleries such as Tequila Herradura are strict about using only agave older than ten years.
Cooking
Some distilleries receive their harvested agave hearts and pre-cook them to remove wax from the outside of the hearts or residual leaf roots that have not been cut, which can become an unwelcome source of bitterness during the cooking process. Distilleries using modern equipment use high-temperature jet steam to achieve the same effect.
Traditionally, distilleries used steam chambers or stone or brick ovens, known in Spanish as Horno, to slowly soften cut agave hearts over a period of 50 to 72 hours. The slow roasting at 60 to 85 degrees Celsius softens the plant fibers and releases the natural juices, but does not cook them so quickly and so vigorously that the juices become bitter or unnecessarily consume the valuable fermentable sugars. Another advantage of using an oven to roast agave is that there is a better way to preserve the plant's original flavor. However, due to the demands of large-scale commercial production, many of today's large distilleries favor the use of high-efficiency steam autoclaves or pressure cookers to steam the agave hearts, dramatically shortening the process to less than a day (8 to 14 hours).
The steaming process not only softens the fibers to release more juice, it also converts complex carbohydrates into fermentable sugars. Straight from the stove, agave hearts taste very much like sweet potatoes or taro, but with an added agave flavor. Traditionally, distilleries allow the agave hearts to cool for 24 to 36 hours after cooking before grinding and pulping them, but some traditional distilleries intentionally keep the pulp and ferment it.
When the agave hearts are thoroughly softened and cooled, workers break them up with large hammers and transfer them to a giant mill, traditionally driven by donkeys or oxen, known as a tahona, for further grinding. While modern distilleries may use mechanical power instead of animal power, some have even switched to automated grinders to process the pulp or pomace, removing impurities for use as feed or fertilizer. The removed agave juice (called aquamiel, meaning sugar water) is then mixed with some pure water and placed in vats to ferment.
Fermentation
The next step is to sprinkle yeast on the agave sap, known as tepache. Although traditionally the yeast used to make tequila is collected from the leaves of the agave, most distilleries today use artificial yeast grown from wild strains of the fungus or even commercially available brewer's yeast. Some traditional mezcals or pulque are naturally fermented using wild yeasts that drift through the air, but only one of Tequila's oldest distilleries, Tequila Herradura, emphasizes this method of fermentation. However, some argue that relying on naturally occurring yeast is too risky, and that the use of additional antibiotics to control the stability of the product in order to inhibit the growth of unwanted microbes is often debatable.
The vessels used to ferment tequila juice may be wooden or modern stainless steel tanks, and if the natural fermentation process is maintained, it can take anywhere from seven to twelve days. In order to speed up the process, many modern distilleries accelerate the yeast production by adding specific chemicals to the tanks to shorten the time to two or three days. The longer fermentation time results in a fuller bodied wine, and the winery will often keep some of the finished primary must to use as a lead-in for the next fermentation.
Distillation
After the longan juice has been fermented, the result is a beer-like fermented spirit with an alcohol content of between 5% and 7%. Traditional distilleries use copper pot stills for two distillations, while modern distilleries use stainless steel continuous stills. The first distillation takes one and a half to two hours and produces a spirit with an alcohol content of about 20%. The second distillation takes three to four hours and produces a spirit with an alcohol content of about 55 percent.
In principle, each batch of distillation is divided into three parts: the first part, which is higher in alcohol but contains too many Aldehydes, is usually discarded. The middle portion is the best quality and is the main portion of the product that is collected. At the end of the distillation, the alcohol and flavors in the product begin to diminish, so some distilleries collect it and add it to the next batch of raw materials to be distilled, while others simply discard it. A few distilleries that emphasize high quality use triple distillation to make Tequila, but the need for this is often questioned by sommeliers as it tends to diminish the flavor of the product. In contrast, most Mezcal is distilled only once, although a few premium products are distilled twice.
From the beginning of the agave harvest to the finished product, about one liter of spirit is produced for every seven kilograms of agave hearts.
Aging
Freshly distilled tequila is completely clear and colorless, and any agave seen on the market that has color is due to aging in oak casks or the addition of caramel for the spirit (only Mixto can add caramel). The oak barrels used for aging tequila come from a wide variety of sources, the most common being second-hand bourbon barrels imported from the United States, but there is no shortage of distilleries using more rare options such as Spanish sherry, Scotch whisky, French cognacs, or even brand new oak barrels. There is no minimum aging period for tequila, but there are specific minimums for certain grades. White agave (Blanco) is a clear new spirit that is completely unaged and is stored in stainless steel casks before being bottled and sold, or simply bottled as soon as it has been distilled.
Most distilleries dilute the product to the desired alcohol strength (mostly between 37-40%, although there are a few that are more than 50% abv) with softened, purified water prior to bottling, and undergo a final activated carbon or vegetal fiber filtration to completely remove impurities.
As with other spirits, the liquor contained in each bottle of tequila may come from multiple barrels of similar vintage, using blending to ensure a consistent flavor profile. However, because of this, the premium tequila market can occasionally see rare "Single Barrel" products, similar to Scotch whisky or French Cognac original barrels, especially emphasizing that the entire bottle is from a specific barrel, and accompanied by a detailed barrel number, the year of casking and the name of the producer, limited edition. It is a limited edition, with a detailed cask number, year of casking, and the name of the producer. All tequila bottled for sale must be inspected by the Tequila Regulatory Commission (Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT)) before it can be sold, breaking the stereotype of tequila as a casually produced, low-quality spirit. [Edit] Grading Standards Besides the fact that there are gold and silver (transparent) colors, few people really understand that Tequila actually has a grading system as well. Although each winery usually creates its own style of product according to its own product positioning, the following grades are official standards that are guaranteed by law and cannot be abused.
Blanco or Plata
Blanco and Plata are the Spanish words for "white" and "silver," respectively, and in the realm of tequila it can be considered an unaged spirit that does not need to be aged. In the field of tequila, it can be considered an unaged spirit that does not need to be aged in oak barrels. Some tequilas are bottled directly after distillation, some are stored in stainless steel containers, and some are aged briefly in oak barrels in order to make them more palatable. What's special about this is that, while the aging standards for alcohol are set at a lower limit, the upper limit for Blanco grade agave is set at a maximum of 30 days.
Note that the Blanco label only indicates the aging characteristics of the product, but not the composition, and that there are very pure "100% Agave" products in this class that are not necessarily Mixto blends. Blanco grade tequilas usually have a more spicy, direct vegetal aroma, but in the eyes of some consumers who prefer this type of spirit, the white tequila is the one that truly represents the distinctive flavor profile of tequila.
Joven abocado
Joven abocado means "young and smooth" in Spanish, and is often referred to as oro (golden). Basically, blonde and white agave can be the same thing, except that the blonde versions have partial coloring and flavoring (including caramel and oak quenching, which must not exceed 1% by weight), making them look a bit like aged products. In terms of categorization, these are all Mixto, which is theoretically not as premium as 100% agave, but is still the mainstay of sales in the export market because of its affordability.
Reposado
Reposado is the Spanish word for "rested," meaning that this grade of wine has been aged in oak barrels for a certain period of time, but just under a year. Barrel storage usually makes tequila taste stronger and more complex, as the spirit absorbs some of the oak's flavors or even color, which gets darker with time. reposado is aged between two months and a year, and currently accounts for the largest portion of Tequila sales in Mexico, with a share of 60% of the total.
A?ejo
A?ejo means "aged" in Spanish, which simply means that wines aged in oak barrels for more than a year belong to this class, with no upper limit. However, unlike the previous three grades, aged tequilas are subject to much stricter government control, and they must be sealed in oak barrels with a capacity of no more than 350 liters, and sealed by government officials. Although it is stipulated that anything aged for more than a year can be called a?ejo, there are a few very rare and high-priced products. Tequila Herradura's famous "Selección Suprema", for example, is one of the most expensive products aged for more than four years, and its market price is not even inferior to a bottle of Scotch whisky aged for 30 years. In general, experts agree that the optimal aging period for tequila is four to five years, beyond which too much alcohol evaporates from the barrels.
Except for a few specialties that are aged eight to ten years, most A?ejo is aged for the full term and then moved directly to stainless steel casks that are not aged for bottling.Reposado and A?ejo grades of Tequila do not specify that they must be 100% agave, and if the product's labeling doesn't specify otherwise, then it's a bottle of M.E. Scotch. Then it's an aged Mixto blend, such as Tequila Sauza's Sauza Conmemorativo, a rare aged Mixto.
In addition to these four officially recognized classifications, distilleries may also promote their products with variations on the names of these basic categories, or even create their own class designations, such as gran reposado, tres a?ejos, or blanco suave, to name just a few.Reserva de casa is also an occasional product designation that usually Reserva de casa is also an occasional product designation, usually referring to the winery's proudest top-shelf signature wine, but keep in mind that these various designations are all marketing tricks of the wineries, and that only the four mentioned above have any official binding force. [edit]Product identification </B>
Every certified bottle of Tequila should have a label that clearly indicates the information on it, which is usually more than just the brand name of the product, but in fact contains a lot of important information.