We have two ways of planting our magueys:

• Espadín is planted through sprouts, the plants develop shoots from the roots, we cut and then plant them when they are between two and three years.
• We allow 20 percent of our wild magueys to develop a quiote and flowers. Then, we gather the seeds and take them to our greenhouse to germinate. After a year, we plant them in our fields, where they will live for the rest of their lives.

A maguey plant needs around seven to 25 years to grow in a field. The growth depends on the species and the conditions in which it develops. In Gracias a Dios, we wait for a plant to have its quiote, to then cut it and eight months later come back to cut the maguey.

After a period of six to 25 years on the field, the maguey absorbs the flavors, then we harvest it. We cut off the maguey pencas and leave only the heart, also called “piña”. The maguey hearts/piñas weight between 50 to 200 kilograms depending on the harvested species.

Once we have the maguey piñas, we cut them in four parts and bake them in our conical shaped oven, fed by fire made with plagued tree logs of the region. The maguey spends four days in the oven: 2 days of cooking and 2 days to cool down.

La Gaviota is our star in the grinding process, she is a beautiful mare, who is in charge of milling the cooked maguey. She works two hours daily, and then she roams freely in the factory.

All of La Gaviota’s work is used for this process: the bagasse and the juice that was grinded is then placed in 1,000-liter pine tree tubs. Here, Oscar formulates the mezcal, that needs from 10 to 18 days to ferment. Our fermentation is 100 percent natural and no kind of yeast or other products are added to accelerate the process.

Once the maguey is fermented, we place it in our 250-liter copper alembic. The alembic works with logs of plagued trees. The fermented maguey is heated to a boil and the vapors condense in alcohol; we repeat this process twice. In Gracias a Dios, we discard the heads and tails of the distillation and only use the heart of the mezcal, this way we obtain better flavor and better quality mezcal. All our mezcales are leveled to 45 ALC/VOL, this is the degree we enjoy the most.

All of our packing process is handmade by women from Matatlán. “Shin Dobb” is the cooperative that helps us place the mezcal and label the bottles.