Like certain other spirits, such as bourbon and Scotch, there are laws dictating what can be qualified as tequila. Tequila is a type of distilled alcoholic spirit - like whiskey, rum and vodka - that is made from the cooked and fermented juice of the blue agave plant, a succulent native to Mexico. Made with 100 percent agave, our picks are affordable, expensive, subtle, aromatic and everything in between. If we broke tequila, however, we can also fix it. We became consumers, largely, of what’s known as mixto - tequila made using only 51 percent agave and 49 percent non-agave sugars, usually cane sugars. They had to change how they made the spirit, which modernized and mechanized it,” Martineau says.Īnd so the bar for tequila (which is actually part of the mezcal family) was lowered. “By the time official laws defined tequila in the 1970s” - it must be made using at least 51 percent blue weber agave, and only in five regions of Mexico - “the spirit had already gained popularity in the U.S., to the point where producers in Mexico were having trouble keeping up with demand. “Americans did fundamentally change the industry in Mexico,” says Chantal Martineau, a spirits writer and the author of How the Gringos Stole Tequila: The Modern Age of Mexico’s Most Traditional Spirit. Our drinking culture, with its collegiate attitude toward the spirit, has reflected back on the way the spirit is now made, and its place in Mexican culture. Seven out of every ten bottles are exported out of Mexico, and 80 percent of those end up in the States. Incredibly, that’s just the tip of the iceberg for tequila’s problems. At least absinthe gets to be the bad boy. In America, it’s all about getting trashed glugging with cheap margarita mix doing shots that are so unpalatable you need to assault your own tongue with salt and acidic lime toeing the line between lit up and throwing up. There is perhaps no spirit as villainized or misused as tequila.
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