In November I visited seven tequila distilleries in Mexico. Here are some pictures and notes from my visit to the Sauza distillery in the town of Tequila.
(First we visited the agave nursery. Sauza is unique in that they propagate their agave not by using baby plants but by… fancier scientific means.)
(This is what an agave looks like if allowed to propagate.)
(You can see close-up that instead of producing seeds, the mother plant produces little baby plants.)
(We had a lecture about plant propagation.)
(I just like this picture from the distillery.)
(This is the diffuser. Super clean at Sauza.)
The blue color of agave comes from a wax on the plant. This wax covers the pores of the plant to protect it from drying out in the dry season.
Unlike most tequila distilleries, at Sauza they shred agave and use the diffuser before they cook the agave juice in autoclaves.
Then they only cook the juice for 3-4 hours.
They ferment in covered fermentation tanks
The first distillation is in a column still, second in a stainless steel pot still
The Tres Generaciones line has a third distillation in a copper pot still
In November I visited seven tequila distilleries in Mexico. Here are some pictures and notes from my visit to theHerradura distillery in the town of Amatitan.
(Here they split the agave in two before baking.)
(The magic of Herradura is that it ferments naturally- no yeast is added.)
(Sleeping tequila.)
Agave grows for 7-10 years before harvesting
Jimadors work for 6 hours a day and harvest about 120 plants
They use clay/brick ovens, each one holding about 48 tons
Agave cooks for 26 hours then cools for 24
They use a rollermill to shred the agave after cooking, then a diffuser to get out the last bits of sugar
The fermentation takes about 4 days
The first distillation takes 3 hours, the second 6
They use stainless steel stills
They don't move the barrels around, refill them where they are. Use same barrels for about 10 years before replacing
Between Herradura, El Jimador, and Antiguo, all of which are 100% agave products, they say the only difference is the amount of aging and the percent of alcohol. [That's not quite true, here is a chart that spells out the differences.]
In November I visited seven tequila distilleries in Mexico. Here are some pictures and notes from my visit to the Jose Cuervo distillery in the town of Tequila.
(First we visited an agave field.)
(The jimador harvested the agave plant to get the pina, or pineapple, center.)
(I planted my own agave from the cuttings of a mother plant. I'll need to go back there in 7 or so years and drink that sucker.)
(After harvesting, they load the agave pinas into the ovens. I didn't notice at the time, but it appears they put the whole agaves into the ovens without chopping them into smaller pieces.)
(Copper pot stills.)
(We sampled some Reserva de la Famila out of the barrel.)
April and May are the planting months for agave
Agave is harvested year-round, though they usually avoid the rainiest month
Cuervo irrigates their agave
They prune the leaves of their agave plants for three reasons: Because they're sharp, to avoid insects laying eggs in them, and to help the heart grow faster
For Reserva de la Familia, they cut out the cogollo, not for the mixto
Cuervo owns 4 distilleries
The distillery had 110,000 visitors last year
They use only oven, no autoclaves
The product of the first distillation, called ordinario, is cloudy
Heads and tails are called vinasas. They are mixed with the agave fibers and made into fertilizer. This happens here and at most distilleries we visited.
Reserva de la Familia agave is grown in special fields. It is aged in a combination of French and American oak barrels.
(I think it's a raven and not a crow, but hey look, I took a cool picture!)
In November I visited seven tequila distilleries in Mexico. Here are some pictures and notes from my visit to the Cazadores and Corzo distillery in the town of Arandas.
(Autoclaves cook agave much faster than traditional brick/clay ovens.)
(It's a huge operation here. The liquids travel in pipes through a tunnel beneath a road separating parts of the distillery.)
(Stainless steel stills.)
In 1922 the recipe for Cazadores reposado was created
They process 200 tons of agave per day in the distillery
The autoclaves cook agave for 10 hours at 120 Celsius. Soon they're reducing the cooking time to 8 hours.
After shredding the agave (after cooking it in autoclaves), they put it in a diffuser; a relatively recent technology that gets the last bits of the sugar out of the agave
They allow the agave to ferment for about 4 days. The tequila undergoes an alcoholic then a malolactic fermentation
The first distillation takes about 10 hours, the second takes about 24 hours
The stills are stainless steel
They do have a column still that they use "when demand is high"
Corzo starts from Cazadores reposado. It is then redistilled and re-aged.
They aged in new white American oak, with some French oak for Corzo
(After the tour, dinner and a dance show in the distillery.)
In November I visited seven tequila distilleries in Mexico. Here are some pictures and notes from my visit to Casa Pedro Domecq in the town of Arandas.
(Agave being loaded into ovens. They use the same agave for treatment with rollermill as with tahona.)
This distillery makes Tezon tequila, Olmeca Altos, and a mixto tequila for the Mexican market. I believe Tezon is all tahona tequila. This was distributed by Pernod Ricard in the US, but it appears they've abandoned it and are pursuing sales of Olmeca Altos, which is about half the price, instead. This tequila, also 100% agave, is made by blending agave that has been processed with a roller mill with tahona agave.
(In the rollermill process, after the agave is baked to break up the complex into simpler, fermentable sugars, the agave is shredded using a rollermill.)
(The tahona method. After baking the agave, the chunks of agave are placed in this pit. The large volcanic stone wheel rotates around in it, crushing the agave to expose the sugars before distillation. In olden times, the tahona would have been pulled by a mule.)
(This is the post-tahona agave. Gross. The fibers actually reabsorb the liquids here. All of it is thrown into the fermentation tanks.)
(Fermenting agave juice.)
(These stills are for the tahona agave- the big opening is so they can put in the fibers.)
(In the warehouse, they cover the lids of some barrels with plastic to reduce evaporation.)
Agave for Olmeca Altos is 7-8 years old before harvest.
They cut out the cogollo (the interior of the plant where it would sprout to reproduce if it could) in the field.
They heat the agave in ovens, though they own an autoclave that is sometimes used for the mixto.
They use larger pot stills for the mixto.
They ferment and distill the tahona agave with the agave fibers, not the rollermill agave.
The reposado tequila is aged in ex-bourbon barrels for 6-8 months.
They replace the barrels after 9-10 years. They tried recharring the barrels but didn't like the results.
The last agave shortage was in 2000 and 2001. Some people predict another shortage in a year or two.
Lowland soils are sandier, darker, and more volcanic
60-70% of agave for tequila is grown in the highlands
Last week I visited the Isle
of Jura, The Dalmore, and Fettercairn distilleries in Scotland. These
brands are all owned by White &
Mackay. This post is about visiting the Fettercairn distillery.
(Fettercairn marked with red pin. Map made with Google Maps)
From The Dalmore distillery we went on yet another gorgeous drive over two mountain ranges to reach Fettercairn, a distillery named after the town where it is located. As you can see on the map below, after you come down from the mountains where much of the vegetation is heather (brown at this time of year) like low scrub bushes, you hit the eastern farmlands with rich soils and plenty of water coming off the hills.
The Fettercairn distillery is about a five-minute walk from the center of Fettercairn with its one pub and stone arch commemorating a pit stop from Queen Victoria. It is surrounded by fields and there are cattle grazing across from the distillery.
The distillery is full of much original equipment from 1824 with a few technological improvements. They no longer do floor maltings (I think only five or six distilleries still do) but otherwise things look pretty old-fashioned here.
(Fettercairn Distillery. Cows in foreground.)
The mash tun is an old copper-topped one with mechanically-driven (see below) stirrers inside. The drainage at the bottom of these older mash tuns is different from newer models, so to compensate the barley must be ground to a courser level.
(Above: Copper-topped mash tun. Below: Inside the mash tun.)
The distillery also has wooden washbacks where fermentation happens. Most wooden washbacks I've seen are made from Doug Fir pine from Oregon.
(Wooden washback)
Unlike at The Dalmore distillery that uses the brown-colored peat-rich river water, Fettercairn uses water from an underground spring for mashing, fermentation, and reducing to barrel proof. It is crystal clear and rich with minerals- you can taste a sort of metallic-granite flavor and it is very drying in the mouth, almost a tannic feeling.
(Stills at Fettercairn)
Fettercairn has two pairs of stills and the still for the second distillation (the "spirit still") has a pretty unique feature.
On yesterday's post about The Dalmore I noted that the still has a reflux box (don't know the technical name for it) in which cold water runs around the top of the neck of the still to encourage only the heavy flavor molecules to cross over.
At Fettercairn they do this in a different way: during the part of the distillation when they're getting the heart of the spirit (the part that will actually be put in barrels rather than recycled), cold water runs down the outside of the neck of the still. I've never seen anything like this on a still before.
It's hard to capture in pictures, so I took this short video. I think this is supercool, but I'm a nerd.
After the whisky is distilled and put into barrels it is stored in traditional dunnage warehouses- old, earthen floor warehouses in which barrels are stacked no more than three-high. There are thick walls and in this case a slate roof. The walls are super moldy and reminded me a lot of the aging warehouses in Cognac.
In these dunnage warehouses (about 12 of them for Fettercairn, all local), there is not a great deal of temperature difference between the top and bottom row. This is quite different from a racked warehouse (think of the tall bourbon warehouses), in which casks are stacked several stories high and temperature, evaporation, and rate of aging vary greatly in different parts of the warehouse.
Now for the bad news: Fettercairn is not available in the US. Even in Scotland its pretty rare to find it as a single-malt. They released a new bottling called Fior that's really tasty and they can't keep it on the shelves. They also sell some 30-year-old and 40-year-old expressions but who can afford such things?
We tasted several barrel samples and they were really wild- a 2004 ex-bourbon had a salty finish and a bourbon grain taste. A 1997 sherry refill cask sample tasted fruity-savory with flavors of sundried tomato and cranberry. The 1974 and 1973 ex-American oak hogsheads were insane floral explosions of lilac, jasmine, rose, and other candied flower flavors.
I assume that most all Fettercairn goes into blends, as most whisky goes toward blends even if it is from a notable single-malt. I do wish they sold this single-malt in the states because:
