Have you tried Sotol?
Plus an excerpt from a new book on tequila, mezcal, and agave spirits
Casa Lotos Sotol: A Gentle Tequila-like Spirit
The fillets were heaped in cool water in the sink. We had spent the better part of an hour slicing and skinning the hefty catfish we had caught. Next up would come soaking the meat in buttermilk and the breading and frying.
The pause in the work called for a drink. “This is a bit like tequila,” I told my two guests. Neither of them reacted enthusiastically to this description. So I tried again. “It’s like Tequila, but very different. It’s really easy.” Neither of these gents are boozehounds, but both were game to try this exotic hooch. I poured out ample slugs of Casa Lotos Sotol Blanco. “Sip it,” don’t shoot it,” I advised. And we did.
Smiles around. Everyone agreed—this is a gentle spirit. There was no headshake or exhaled “Phew!” after swallowing it. Just smiles. Later we added to Sotol to our Micheladas (Sotol, lime juice, a dash of hot sauce, Clamato, and 4 to 6 ounces of Mexican lager) in place of tequila. Excelente!
Sotol is a spirit that resembles tequila and mezcal. All three of these are made from the pineapple-like center of a spikey plant that grows in hot, arid places. Tequila comes form the blue agave plant, Mezcal from other types of agave, and Sotol is distilled from asylirion wheeleri, a “a species of flowering plant in the asparagus family” and “slow-growing evergreen shrub,” as Wikipedia puts it.
And did I mention that Casa Lotos is a smooth and gentle drink? If you don’t believe me, consider the fact that it won dos gold medals at the San Francisco Spirits Competition this year.
Read more about Casa Lotos Sotol Blanco here. Surf here to locate a bottle of it. (That’s where I am headed—mine’s empty!)
The Curious Bartender’s Agave Safari
By Tristan Stephenson
The passenger footwell of our trusty VW Jetta has in it two legs (mine), a laptop and a few books, a collection of empty beer bottles, plus half a dozen bottles of partially consumed mezcal, tequila and raicilla. There are many more bottles clinking together in the boot and more that didn’t make it this far. Over the past few weeks we have travelled through six Mexican states, discovering the spirit of Mexico in every sense of the term. Addie is in the back, camera in each hand as usual. He gasps at something beautiful out of the window – an impressive giant cardon cactus on this occasion – and the camera shutter clicks. Addie remarks for the thousandth time that there won’t be enough pages in this book to fit all of his photos….
In this last week I sampled a mezcal made by a teenager in rural Michoacán. He’s the sixth generation of his family to produce agave spirits. The drink had been distilled from wild agave harvested on nearby mountain slopes along with the body of a coyote.
The week before that we shared a meal with four generations of the same family who were making the agave spirit raicilla on a small ranch in the mountains of western Jalisco. Numerous types of agave were growing all around us. The children played around the fermentation vats while the mothers made salsa and cooked tortillas on an open fire and the men packed a paste of agave fibres around the edge of a tiny copper still to seal it shut. All while the sweet, vegetal smell of cooked agave filled the air and the pungent, green, smack of raicilla coated our mouths. A few days before that we experienced a drug-like “high” from mezcal that cannot legally be called a mezcal made on the foothills of the Colima volcano, which may be where agave spirits first originated….
….This book is a journey through some of the heartlands of agave spirits production. It is a physical, geographical journey, but also a historical, cultural and spiritual one. On the way we will explore different producers, and their stories and philosophies, as well as the story of Mexican spirit: its food, cocktails, music, geography and politics. By the end I hope to have provided you with a strong taste of what makes this country so special and what makes agave spirits one of the most exciting of all the world’s spirits. Above all I hope that it makes you curious to embark on your own journey through the flavour of Mexico.
Tristan Stephenson is the author of the new book, The Curious Bartender's Agave Safari: Discovering and Appreciating Mexico's Tequilas, Mezcals & More (Ryland Peters & Small, 2025), a lavishly illustrated travelogue and guidebook with cocktail recipes. He hosts the Curious Bartender podcast. Text and images reproduced with permission.