how to taste mezcal
There's no right or wrong way to drink anything. If you enjoy your favorite spirit served straight, stirred in a cocktail, or funneled out of a third floor dorm window do you! However, if you want to taste mezcal (or any other spirit) in a way that allows you to enjoy its full complexity and appreciate all of its qualities, there are some simple steps to help you experience these.
Each flavor and aroma in your glass is the product of some combination of the person, plants, and place that created it—the mezcalero and his or her techniques, the agaves and the land where they grew, the types of stills, and the water used during fermentation are all elements that add their signature. Tasting mezcal is the moment when those concepts become more than words on a label and start to have real meaning.
The following steps are how we recommend tasting mezcal in order to let your senses perceive everything as clearly as possible, uncovering layers of flavor, and making the mental connections to deeply embedded sense memories that you didn't know were stored in the back of your mind.
Try not to be with people or places that smell bad, or good, or at all. This isn't always realistic, but the less perfume, curry, and cigar smoke around, the easier it will be for your nose and tastebuds to do their thing. At a minimum, wash your hands with unscented soap and don't brush your teeth right before tasting.
Don’t Smell
Download the tasting wheel. Seeing the names of specific flavors and aromas is really helpful when making connections between what you taste and where you remember it from.
2. Refresh your sense memory
3. Pour yourself 1 oz
Some people prefer a wide, shallow copita, or a tall, narrow Glencairn. We prefer veladoras for their simplicity, price, durability, and their ability to crowd together when we're tasting a bunch of different things. They are generally WAY overpriced outside Mexico, but AgaveEnLinea.com has some great ones for a very reasonable price.
cocktails
Mezcal works well as an ingredient in a wide variety drinks, but not all mezcals will work equally well.
Mezcals under 45% are easily overpowered by other ingredients, or they try to compensate for their low ABV by ratcheting up the smoke to a point where it's the only flavor the mezcal adds to the cocktail. Whether it's a negroni, old fashioned or margarita, the mezcal should be in balance with the other ingredients, and you should be able to appreciate the full flavor of the mezcal - earthy notes, vegetal notes, herbal notes, fruit notes - not just the smoke.
Lots of full strength mezcals that taste great on their own don't play nice with the standard vermouths, bitters, juices and syrups in a bar. We love a lot of things about Mal Bien "white tape" espadin- how it drinks neat, the price, and not least of all, how it shines through in cocktails without clashing against the other ingredients.
Let the mezcal in the glass breathe for a few minutes, especially if you're opening a new bottle. When you're ready to begin nose-ing it, bring the glass about an inch from your nose, open your mouth a bit, and take a long, steady inhale.
4. DO smell
Depending on the mezcal's % ABV and your sensitivity, you may find the alcohol overpowers all the other notes. Try pouring a tiny amount in your hands and then rub them together for a few seconds to make the alcohol evaporate. Now, cup your hands over your nose and mouth and breathe in slowly and steadily to experience the aromas without the alcohol interfering.
5. smell better
Let it linger in your mouth before swallowing. Don't worry about what you're tasting yet, just let your mouth get comfortable with having something intense in there. This is like stretching before a workout.
6. take a small sip
7. take a slightly larger sip
Let it linger in your mouth before swallowing. Don't worry about what you're tasting yet, just let your mouth get comfortable with having something intense in there. This is like stretching before a workout.
Go through steps 5-7 as many times as you want, then try waiting several minutes before coming back to it. You can reset your nose and palate by taking a sniff of your shirt or the crook of your elbow, and having a sip of a boring beer (water, if you must). With time, notes that were dominant on the first go around may quiet down a bit, allowing some of the more delicate notes to move from the background to center stage.
8. rinse and repeat
9. compare and contrast
Depending on the bottles you have available, it can be fun to do some side-by-side tastings to explore the work of a single mezcalero or a geographic region.
A big part of the fun with mezcal (and most things in life) is sharing what we've learned with friends. The best version of this involves telling a person what you love about a mezcal or mezcalero. Explain the concepts in a way that the other person understands so that you spark their curiosity.
The worst version of it involves pounding them with lingo that doesn't mean anything to them, or lecturing them about technical and historical facts that they're not interested in (yet). Unless you're interviewing for a job, the goal of a conversation should never be showing other people how smart you are.
¡Salud!
10. try not to be annoying