What’s Heritage, Anyway?

According to our interview with Catalina Lopez Velasco, a maestra mezcalera in Yutanduchi de Guerrero, the traditional methods of making agave spirits in her community in Oaxaca’s Mixteca region only date back to the late 1990s, when a bunch of kids from university came to teach them how to turn the wild agaves growing all around them into spirits. So … why do they use such pre-industrial methods? Why didn’t they adopt modern ways of fermenting and distilling? This and more in this episode of Agave Road Trip!