Erstwhile - Jabali by Silverio Garcia (2023 Ancestral Limited Edition) Mezcal

Only 100 liters made. Jabalí agaves are the most difficult, temperamental agave varietal to work with due to the foam – resulting from saponins, a naturally occuring compound in jabalí agaves – generated at every stage of production from roasting to fermentation to distillation.

Jabalí requires much more work and yields much less mezcal, compared to other agave varietals. It took about fifty-five pounds of raw Jabalí agave to make one liter of mezcal (or 1 metric ton of raw agave for every forty liters of mezcal) for this particular batch.

A legacy of the era when Mezcal production was illegal in Oaxaca, this batch of Jabalí crafted by Silverio García Luis – a 2023 Ancestral Limited Release – rescues a García family tradition that had been forgotten for almost fifty years.

Don Lencho, Silverio’s father, used a hollowed out quiote (the flowering stalk of agave plants) instead of a copper turbante, to evade the military that would come and seize his distillation equipment by force.