Learn from Mezcal Guru Lou Bank at Our March 1 Tasting Event

Come to our March 1 live event, “Mezcal, Tequila, Chocolate and You,” and you’ll learn anything you ever wanted to know about Mexican agave spirits.

We say that because guest presenter Lou Bank is one of the nation's leading experts on mezcal and tequila.

Lou created and leads the non-profit organization S.A.C.R.E.D. (Saving Agave for Culture, Recreation, Education and Development), which helps improve lives in the rural Mexican communities where heritage agave spirits are made.

He is the host of Agave Road Trip, a weekly podcast that helps bartenders better understand agave, agave spirits, and rural Mexico. In 2018, Lou was honored with the Golden Spirit Award from Tales of the Cocktail for his presentation "So You Think You Know Mezcal...?”

To set the table, Lou kindly provided the following answers to our emailed questions. Click the button below to get your tickets, and you’ll get to taste what Lou is talking about.

What is S.A.C.R.E.D. and how/why did you create the organization?

The more Tequila and Mezcal we drink, the more environmental pressure we are putting on the Mexican communities where these spirits are produced. And that pressure tends to fall hardest on the people who are least capable of dealing with them.

In this case, those families are often the stewards of the cultural heritage surrounding Mexico’s traditional agave spirits.

I founded SACRED to help mitigate that pressure on those families. We ask them what their problems are, what solutions they imagine to those problems, and what resources they need to implement those theoretical solutions. Then we go looking for those resources.

It’s easy to view this as charity, and I suppose in one sense it is that. In another sense, it’s an attempt to clean up some of the damage I do by my consumption patterns.

But for me, the bigger truth is that these families often use ancestral methods to make these spirits. It’s a different approach and a different mindset than the one that serves as the foundation of the community I live in here in Chicago.

And that approach — that multi-generational wisdom — is applied in so many ways by these families in their communities. I think that multi-generational wisdom can help us solve some the problems we face as a society today: food insecurity, water insecurity, climate change.

I don’t think we can afford to lose that multi-generational wisdom — which is the risk if we don’t adjust our consumption patterns and we don’t do more to clean up the problems we make through those patterns.

For agave spirits newbies, what is the difference between tequila and mezcal, and why can only agave spirits made in Mexico be labeled as tequila and mezcal?

Both tequila and mezcal are agave spirits. They are also both “Denominations of Origin,” in the same way that Scotch and Bourbon are expressions of whiskeys.

There are rules about how they can be made and where they can be made, and those rules are established by the countries that control those Denominations of Origin.

Mexico controls what can and cannot be called tequila and mezcal. For starters, both must be made by distilling fermented agave.

The differences?

First, the Mexican government says that tequila can only be made in the state of Jalisco and specific communities in the states of Guanajuato, Michoacan, Nayarit and Tamaulipas.

Mezcal can only be made in Oaxaca, Zacatecas, Durango, Guanajuato, Guerrero, San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, Puebla and Sinaloa. So there’s a geographical difference.

Second, while both spirits are distilled from fermented agave, there are literally hundreds of kinds of agave. Only one can be used to make tequila: Tequilana Blue Weber, or Weber Azul. Any of those hundreds of agave can be used to make mezcal.

From there, it gets even more complicated. I wrote an article that helps further explain it:

https://www.insidehook.com/drinks/tequila-mezcal-differences

Apart from attending a Lou Bank event, how can you best know what tequilas and mezcals to buy?

I get this question a lot: what’s best to buy. And the answer is, whichever you like best. Every palate is different. And then, if you want to help preserve the communities the spirits come from, look into how the companies support the communities from which they source their spirits.

You're pairing on the March 1 tasting with the folks at Vosges Haut-Chocolat, who are hosting the events. Why do agave spirits and chocolate work so well together?

Most finely made agave spirits have *some* sense of chocolate to me: in the flavors or in the aromas. But that could just be me. You might hate the pairing. But there are worse experiments to conduct than to spend a Saturday afternoon drinking Mexican spirits and eating fine chocolate!