The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks Read Free Page A

tamarind, pistachio, or other fruits.
    Because no preservatives are added, pulque is always served fresh. The yeasts and bacteria remain active and the taste changes within a few days. Canned, pasteurized versions are available, but the microbes die off and the flavor suffers. It is, after all, the lively microbial mix that wins pulque comparisons to yogurt as well as beer. With its healthy dose of B vitamins, iron, and ascorbic acid, pulque is practically considered a health food. While beer has been the beverage of choice in Mexico for decades, pulque is making a comeback not only in Mexico but in border cities like San Diego as well.
mezcal and tequila
    Any number of popular books on tequila and mezcal claim that when the Spanish arrived in Mexico, they needed a stronger drink to fortify themselves against the long and bloody struggle to come and introduced distillation as a way to turn pulque into a higher-proof spirit. In fact, tequila and mezcal are made from entirely different species of agave than pulque. The method for harvesting the plant and making the spirit is completely different, too.
    It turns out to be very difficult to put pulque in a still and get strong liquor from it. The complex sugar molecules in agave nectar don’t break down readily during fermentation, and heat from distillation causes unpleasant chemical reactions that create nasty flavors like sulfur and burning rubber. Extracting agave sugars for distillation requires a different technique—one that had already been perfected before the Spanish arrived.
    Archeological evidence—including the aforementioned coprolite analysis carried out by Eric Callen and others—proves that people living in Mexico prior to the Spanish invasion enjoyed a long tradition of roasting the heart of the agave for food. Pottery fragments, early tools, paintings, and actual remnants of digested agave all confirm this beyond a doubt. Roasted agave is a gourmet experience; imagine a richer, meatier version of grilled artichoke hearts. It would have made a fine meal by itself.
    But a high-proof spirit can also be made from the roasted hearts. The roasting process breaks down the sugars in a different way, yielding lovely caramelized flavors that make for a rich, smoky liquor. When the Spaniards arrived, they observed the locals tending to agave fields, monitoring the plants closely, and harvesting them at a precise point in their development, right before the bud emerged from the base to form a flowering stalk. Instead of scraping out the center to force the flow of sap, as was the practice for making pulque, the agave leaves were hacked away, revealing a dense mass called a piña, which resembled a pineapple or an artichoke heart. Those were harvested and roasted in brick or stone-lined ovens set in the ground, then covered so that they could smolder for several days.
    Native people had clearly worked out a method for cultivating and roasting the agave. Pre-Columbian stone pits built for this purpose can still be found in Mexico and the southwestern United States. Now some archeologists point to remnants of crude stills to suggest that people might not have simply roasted the agave for food—they might have already been working on distillation methods prior to European contact.
    This is a controversial idea hotly debated among academics. What we know for certain is that the Spaniards introduced new technology. Many of the earliest stills in Mexico are a derivation of the Filipino still, a wonderfully simple bit of equipment made entirely from local materials—mostly plants themselves. The reason the Spaniards get credit for this is that they are the ones who brought the Filipinos to Mexico, courtesy of the Manila-Acapulco galleons. These trading ships took advantage of favorable breezes that made it possible to journey directly from the Philippines to Acapulco in just four months’ time. For 250 years, from 1565 to 1815, the ships brought