Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, guys, I know I say it all the time, probably get tired of hearing it, but I think this one is one of the best interviews that I've done. Today we're going to talk to Monte, the owner of Cacha Sol Tequila, but also he has a distillery, Palenque, a small ricea distillery there in Nairi that is a place that you can visit, learn about how they make racia, learn about the tequila, which they have available there as well, and. And try it out. And the story of how this all came together and the facility that he's put together there is absolutely amazing. He's going to take us on a little tour and we also have some videos, and he's going to talk about what the name of the distillery is that makes Raia. Don't miss this one. It's awesome. Check it out.
All right, Monte, it's great having you here tonight. How are you doing and where are you at? It looks beautiful.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Thank you. I'm in Salita, Mexico, at our Raicia Taberna.
You have our awesome tequilas there, which we make in the Matitan, But I'm at the home of Cacho Sol, which is on the coast of Mexico, just north of Puerto Vallarta. So I'll give you guys a little tour in a little bit.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: That's fantastic. I can't wait to come there. All right, so tell everybody kind of who you are and what is your tequila Keyless story. How did you fall in love with this spirit and end up in this industry?
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Yeah, so I've been in the booze business for about 20 years. The first half of my life was. Most of that was creating new brands for other companies. And so the first half of my life was the type of company where brands were created from a desk using PowerPoints. And the second half of my professional experience was at Dogfish Head, where it was more about being in the brewery, being in the distillery, and sitting around the table with brewers and distillers to figure out what do we want to create, starting with a recipe and then taking it on from there. And so that sort of second half of my career really resonated with me. It was really about creating brands that people want to hear stories about. And so that sort of. That's. That's the major lessons. You name my journey. You know, I used to work for Cuervo and Don Julio. Incredible brands, you know, very different brands that are, what I would say, just. I mean, there's millions of people that love those brands and want those brands, and the Second half of my career was in that side of the business, which I'm sure a lot of the guys and gals that have brands know where you've got something like 180 million drinkers of alcohol in the United States. And when you launch a brand new brand, exactly zero of them of those people care about your brand. And so this journey that I'm on, which I'll unpack for you, really was my solution to figure out how can we turn the model a little bit on its head from the experiences that I had previously.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: That's fantastic. I've tasted the tequila. Like I said, the epic hasn't been here very long and it's half gone. So half of the battle is over. You have great tequila. And that once people know that and then they learn the rest of the story, they're going to dive into it. So let's dive into the name first. So tell me about Cacha. So what's the name mean and where'd that come from?
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Thanks. That it's two words, Cachar and soul to catch the sun. And it's really inspired by this coastal part of Mexico.
You know, this is a very fun outdoor, active, live hard, play hard type of an environment. And Cacho soul is sort of inspired by that. The words are more of a metaphor for the agave plant that sits in the field for about six to seven years. And it's effectively a huge solar panel capturing the energy of the sun, converting that into sugar. And so catch a soul is sort of a metaphor for the lifestyle here. To live in the moment, seize the day, or as we say, Kacha Diem. And then also a connection back to the plan and its role in this whole story.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I like that. Katya Diem. That's very cool as well. So when you were starting this brand, how did you wind up at Nom 1522 and working with a couple of my favorite people, one being Jimmy Salsa and to Ileana Partita, there's a couple of really fantastic people at 1522.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: So super important to me.
Well, and dialing back a little bit my story. So I was at Dogfish Head, which is a craft brewery, best known for its craft beer, but also one of the first craft distilleries. So dogfish started in 2003 when there were about 30 distilleries in the country. I joined Sam the Team to help build out their distillery from somewhat of a hobby into a bit of a business. And so one of the things I was super inspired by there was like, it Started with how do we put the thumbprint of our beer into our spirits program? And the way we primarily did that was with using IPA yeast. So instead of sort of starting from the traditional sense of like, you know, it was a brewery, so we have. We have lots of yeast options. And so we started there. So that was always a kernel of thought for me. And when I started this journey, I probably. It started in the fall of 23, so it was not yesterday, it was. It was a long time ago. And I met a bunch of distilleries. And if for a lot of the folks out there that have started a tequila brand, usually the conversation starts with here. This is what we have in the tank. And so it was really important for me because. And we'll dive into this. Like, the path I wanted to do had a unique recipe story that I wanted to do, but also I wanted to be, you know, no post production flavors added. All the flavor in the glass has to come upstream in the process and I can unpack that for you. So I need it. So I knew those two things and then I went on a journey and I met a lot of distilleries and I met Jimmy and Ileana last summer and I said this thing about the yeast, the ale yeast, and Jimmy was like, awesome, let's do it. And so from that moment, we then basically went through the whole process and tried to say, really, how are people typically doing it and what could we do differently to try to.
Again, the way I describe it is sort of, you have. I'll just say the big commercial brands create a spirit and then the flavor gets added post production, which is fine, but if you're going to choose not that path, then it's a series from the field all the way to the moment of proofing. There's a series of knobs and some knobs you can turn to add flavor and they don't make a big difference, but some knobs are super big. And I really feel like we. We chose in that process, in that streamlined process. Okay, but you asked about Jimmy, so I met him and we mapped out a plan of attack and how we were going to do things very differently. And in the process had the amazing support of Ileana and her family, who are all involved there and their team. Because quite honestly, a lot of what I've done over the last year would not be normal or sort of in the bucket of annoying, but not on my side. And so. But fortunately, I've had the support of all of them and their expertise, obviously.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: And Jimmy is really good at experimenting and knowing how to make different flavors.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, he's got a lot of experience over his career starting in wine. So he has, he. He brings very broad perspective to tequila.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: And to sit and talk to him about history is one of the absolute funnest things to do. It's amazing, the knowledge. So, so to dive in real quick, very mature agaves, low pressure autoclave there at 15:22, you're doing a roller mill and then from there you've got some magic happening in the fermentation. So let's talk about a little bit of the differences between your blanco and then the differences to the epic. Because I know there's a little bit different in the process there.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Totally. I'll. I will go back upstream in that process a little bit. So dogfish again, which was like, I'd say my real training ground.
The term that he would use was off centered and sort of that term, off centered ales for off center people. And that led. Led or created like a big impact on me to always sort of say, what, how's everyone doing it? And can we do things a little bit differently? And so that starts with our agave.
So, you know, quite popular places to get agave are from Los Altos Valles, which is fantastic. They each have their unique elevations, soil compositions, temperature, humidity, pressure, all that stuff. But there is also a growing region in Nayarit which is a little bit less off the beaten path, pretty much. It has the same soil composition as Las Valles, very volcanic. There's where we get our agaves from Tepic, and there's a bunch of agave, or sorry, volcanoes right around there. It's about the same elevation as los Valles, about 3,000ft. But it's got a very different climate. And you know, I'm not going to say anything about better or not like what's better because for us, again, it's less about better and it's more about different. And so we're very proudly, like, it's a big part of our story is like we are getting our agaves from Nayarit and want to tell that story. We've been super impressed. Like if you look at our Instagram, we've got these like Game of Thrones giant eggs. Like the eggs are. They look like giant dragon eggs. And anyway, that was the important first starting point. The other more story. So we. There's a purposeful quality story also that I would say is that, you know, it is less commercialized up there than other regions and we believe we, the soil composition enhances for different type of growing. And so we sort of just leaned right into that point of differentiation. What we thought was a. Was a unique quality story. The other more romantic reason why we're starting in Nayarit is this Cachoe Tiberna that I built here for raisia is also in Bahquia de Manderes, Nayarit. And we can't make tequila here, but there is up north two hours is where Tepik is, and that's one of the municipalities that falls in the Nam.
Okay. So we start up there, and then we harvest that and send that down to a matatan. And we use low pressure autoclave, which, you know, my background at Dogfish, we use the term blissfully inefficient a lot. So in, you know, when you're sort of embracing a more artisanal mindset in tequila versus, say, extremely commercialized, you know, very different mindset when you're. When you're in that space, you need to be thoughtful and purposeful in where are you going to be blissfully inefficient, where you want to be efficient. And why I'm super excited about this low pressure autoclave is that I just think it helps us really dial in one of the most important parts of the process, which is the. Is a conversion to sugar. Because if you don't get good conversion to sugar and good, good sugar, then the downstream sort of falls apart.
So I just want to sort of hit that for a moment. Now. We send it through the mo. The molino, and we run it two times. They got a two roller head, we extract the almosto, and then what happens is it goes into two tanks. So we take one lot, and we do. Since we're super small, we do lots of 20 tons, which is typically the small guy lot.
And that 20 tons then goes, you know, cooked and then milled mosto into the tanks. And then what we do is this is where it gets a little crazy.
So again, IPA fermentation is sort of what I wanted to do. And because when you brew a beer, you select the yeast that is appropriate for that IPA beer because it accentuates usually fruity or citrus notes in the recipe, it enhances and accentuates that. And that's the thinking. And that was something we really noticed at Dogfish in our rums and whiskeys, not so much in our gins and vodkas, because they were neutral spirit, but we really thought that it added. And so that was the experimentation point. So we take the IPA Yeast, we propagate it, we throw it in a tank and we create something very different. Now what's super fun about that story is, you know, the thing about IPA yeast is that it needs a certain temperature. So I came from a brewery where you have conical fermenters that have jackets and are temperature controls. And in a distillery in Mexico, it's thin walled, stainless steel tanks and so. And in a Matitan, it can get up to be about 93 degrees in summer. And so an ale yeast, your typical ale yeast, will die north of 75 degrees degrees, 72 degrees. So we went on a journey of discovery to say, how do we, how do we solve this issue? And we were just about to buy like a huge blanket with a glycol filler system and try to wrap it and keep the fermentation tank cool to use these aliens. But I had talked to a buddy who was a brewer and he's like, what about this one yeast? You should check this out. It can survive in really high temperatures. And so we were able to find that at a home brewer store.
We did a small batch of it, loved it, and then scaled that batch up. So the way that my long story to bring it short is we brew a batch of Mosto using IPA yeast and then we brew a second batch with that same lot that's just wild fermented. And so why that's important is most of the, what I would say is that, you know, in wild fermentation, it's the yeast that are native to that distillery and they survive and thrive in that environment. And they effectively are the thumbprint. They're like the distillery's thumbprint on the agave. And so it was super important for us to do a blend of wild fermented and IPA so that we could have that thumbprint sort of 1522 in the cacha Soul Tequila.
So we then take that, those two, we do two different distillations and they're in two different tanks. And then we have a blend that we do and the blend is slightly different between Blanco and Epic. So epic, it's slightly higher blend of the IPA yeast than the blanco, slightly less. And quite honestly, like, one of the things Jimmy and I are super stoked about is we've done one batch, but we're just going to like batch to batch, move that, that dial back and forth and just have fun with it. And like that way, you know when you drain or even if you have still a Blanco or an Epic on your shelf, there'll be a slightly different still. Very much the cork at your soul profile. But there'll be nuances throughout the course of this brand that people can discover and celebrate or maybe appreciate a little bit less than other ones or something like that. So that's, you know, that's the fun thing with all this stuff.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: That's pretty cool because in the tasting of the blanco, I get that 1522 thumbprint big time. It has a really nice sweetness.
And I don't know if that is coming from the difference of the agaves or if it's coming from Jimmy's magic of tweaking that low pressure autoclave to create some of the sweetest agaves I've ever tasted out of, out of an oven.
And then I do get a different type of citrus and a different type of floral note than I would normally get in a Lowlands Tequila. That makes it really special. And the sweetness is good. And then the epic, which I haven't tasted again today, but the epic blew me away in a completely different way of heat. It drank a little warmer, granted, it's a higher proof, but it had a different type of heat to it, which I kind of wondered where that came from. And it had a different spiciness to it. So I didn't know if that's coming from that IPA yeast or, you know, what's kind of tweaking that flavor. But it's, it's absolutely excellent. It's pretty impressive.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: A couple things. So we do the blend and then we let them sit for at least two months in stainless steel.
So for the esterification and you know, the way that we used to just like describe at the old distillery was like, it's just angry when it comes off the still. You basically taken a plant that's for seven years that happily in the field, you've ripped it apart, cooked it, you know, done all this and then put it in a bottle and it's really fucking angry. So what you want to do is just sort of let it mellow a little bit. Also the sort of molecules connect, we do that for about two months. And then we do not do chill filtration, which I also think, you know, adds a layer of nuance to the finished mouthfeel and product. So, yeah, we tried to like, again, those are the knobs. I'd say that the big knobs that we turn was where the agave comes from, the fermentation and blending step. And then what I think is super important is this sort of non chill filtration thing, which comes with some risks. But like, you know, it. It could look a little cloudier, which is normal. You may have some sediment floating, which is normal, especially in cold climates. But I think it's useful or it's a. It's a risk worth it to. For the finished product.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: Yeah, you can tell all the flavors are there. I sometimes can tell when it's had some type of filtration, because you usually just negate some of that agave flavor, some of that bite. You know, tequila people use the word smooth, and I catch myself saying it too, because it's. It's hard to find a replacement word that. That tequila is really good. But it's supposed to have a bite. It's supposed to have a punch. You're supposed to have that agave feeling with that heat. And the heat's here. The heat doesn't go down here. And that's. I've always felt a good tequila will burn here. You'll get some heat here, but you don't get it here. And that's very representative of this. It's pretty amazing.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: Thank you very much.
Well, Jimmy and I are super stoked how it turned out.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: When I told you. I don't think this is the first time I've tasted these from your bottles, because I sat on the balcony at the ranch and Jimmy was pulling out.
[00:18:43] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, that's right.
[00:18:45] Speaker A: Try this, try this, try this. And there was a couple we kept coming back to, and he didn't tell us what they were. He just kept saying, these are things I'm working on. And one of them was.
He just came out that was in wood fermentation tanks that he put together there with some barrels. And, you know, like I said, he's. He's a great mad scientist in coming up with these different flavors and still staying to the heart of, you know, an additive free, clean, traditional tequila. It's pretty awesome.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: You know, this is a category that's got a lot of history, a lot of tradition, and sort of what's been a super is. I guess it's. He's my muse or whatever. He's like. What I really love working about him is that his. His mind is super curious about doing things differently. And so trying to figure out how do we blend a little bit of a new approach with some stuff that we just know, like tradition that we know, and important process steps that we know we can't change to get to that. Finished the glass?
[00:19:39] Speaker A: Sure.
So is there any age products in the future, Any repos or anehos coming?
[00:19:45] Speaker B: Absolutely. We, you know, we have this experience here, which I'll talk a little bit more about. And I always get asked that, where know, where are those? And you know, the, the statement I always say is if you see a new brand launch and they're launching with repos and anejos, well then more than likely they grab that from a tank. So for us, it's still in the barrel. And we're just, we're like, we pulled a couple of samples here.
They're about 46% and we've been sharing them with guests that are on the property.
And what do we do? Well, we have some from resting in bourbon barrels, which is lovely.
That's a majority of what we did because we got our hands on some bourbon barrels. I don't know which distillery it's from. It's pretty sketchy sourcing anyway, so we got some bourbon barrels. We have some in a rum barrel. And to do this project, I've come down, I've spent probably half of every other week in Mexico for the last year and a half. And so a lot of flights. And I was on a flight back to Dallas, I met a woman, I was reading a CRT published magazine talking about bagasse. And she's like, oh, do you work in tequila? And I'm like, this stupid American trying to do this crazy thing. And so she's like, oh, I just opened a rum distillery in Carmen, Mexico, which is south of Tequila. And this is a wonderful woman who has just got. She's just like an entrepreneur of the first class, many different things. And she just started rum distillery. So the second thing that we're aging is in rum barrels from this woman's distillery in Carmen about two hours east. So I love, I love her story. I love her, I love her rum. And we're gonna be super stoked to have it come out of that. And then the last thing is the vi. So like, in Mexico, there's a wine region that is super popular. It's called Valle de Guadalupe, and it's just south of Tijuana. And it's just like so cool and incredible farm to table. Incredible. So I did a trip there to try to get some like, like, like understand that layer of Mexico and fell in love with some of the wine. So we are also aging it in merlot from Valle de Guadalupe barrels and cabernet from Valle de Guadalupe.
[00:22:01] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: It's a lot. So a lot. And really small. Like, we're super small. And so we basically, the first batch is just going to go in bottles for guests that come through the property here. We're going to road test them here, see what people love the best, then do more batches and those will go in bottles that they go up to the US So I have a very complex business here.
It's not just a tequila made and shipped across the border. It's a tequila that's also sold here in the western side of Mexico. It's a restaurant. It's all this crazy stuff.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: Okay, so let's talk about this facility and kind of what your plan is because you're doing this and tell me if I'm wrong, but you're going at this a little different. You're not looking at importers and distributors and putting this through the normal routes. You're looking at making this tequila. And the ricea we'll talk about as more of an experience than it is something that I'm going to go and look for it in the store. Is that right?
[00:23:00] Speaker B: So the future, like every entrepreneur who starts a tequila brand is world domination. So that's, that's the goal. So we want tequila, world domination, but 20 years of scars, bruises, calluses of the three tier system, you know, sampling events, that retailer, you know, the inefficiencies of that, the inefficiencies of social media. The way I describe it is this. Okay, so I mentioned my little story about how there's 180, 60 million drinkers and when you launch a brand, no one wants it. So the result for most new brands like mine is it's a whole push strategy where you, you create the product, it's on a pallet and you need a wholesaler, you push it into the wholesaler and the wholesaler has to push it out to retail or the bar. And then you're starting to build the pull.
And so I was like, that is a very challenging model. And so what I said was I'm going to create an experience much like we have in the U.S. so like in the U.S. there's 11,000 wineries, 9,000 breweries, 2300 distilleries. They're in major cities, they're, you know, suburbs, they're in vacation towns. And those are not all production facilities, like primarily production facilities. They're mostly brand experiences. And so what we're trying to do here is create an incredibly on brand experience where, oh, the other layer here is like, I just felt like the average as, as your viewership probably would appreciate is that most people don't really understand a good tequila and they certainly don't know what a ricea is.
And so this experience that we built here is trying to bring people into the cache soul world. And instead of the way I use it, like instead of the peanut butter spread of the bottle across a bunch of spots, what we try to do is bring people in here, give them a huge cachoeirasol bear hug and then they walk away with bottles and hats. And you know, it's a model that is super popular and successful across beer, spirits and wine all around the US and that really was my goal here, was to create something. Now your well informed viewership is going to know right away. Well, you're in Nayarit. Well, Nayarit does have a few municipalities up north that fall within the naam, but Baja de Manderas does not.
So and I found this beautiful piece of land. I'll send you a picture and you can sort of show it up. It's just, it's beautiful. It's right in the middle of this vacation town. So what do we do that's authentic? Because you know, someone said, hey, why don't you just build a still in pretend like you're distilling your tequila there? Which is way against everything we're doing.
So in that journey over the last year and a half, I discovered ricea. And you know, we've all, we are all always, we are students of agave, all of us. And ricea journey started for me last spring.
And in that process, sort of right around the same time I met Jimmy, I met a family down in Cabo Corientes, which is about three hours south of here. And they are, well, is fourth generation, he still distills with his dad Adrian. And they have a coastal racea distillery. And I fell in love with it. There's so many layers to their story, how they appreciate the tradition. And so he's come in and helped us build this. So. So Racia.
So tequila has a, has a nom dictating the rules of it. And since like the 70s Mezcal, I'm going to make this up maybe 20 years ago had the nom put Raisia has the nom written and it's in a file on someone's desk in the Mexican government. So it's about to be, you know, at some point in the next six months to five years, it'll be approved. But within that nom, Bahia de Maderos falls within it, within the Racia Nam. And so we built a coastal Racia Tiber now or distillery here.
And why we did that was because we knew we couldn't. We didn't want to tell a fake tequila story, but this is sort of our canvas. It's sort of like we pull a lot of people into the world. Like they. They know. Everyone knows tequila. Many people that are familiar with mezcal and quite honestly, half, I think, like it who are familiar, and half don't like it because they say it's too smoky. And so what we're doing is we're pulling them into. We're using this ricea taberna as sort of like a canvas to tell really to educate people on agave growing. So we use this whole to say, okay, this is how we grow agave for icia. This is how we grow it for tequila. Not here. This is how we cook it in our. Or no, our three ton. Or no, this is how it's different. It's dry roasting here, but it's. It's wet roasting or it's wet steam cooking over there. And then we show them our distillery. We say, okay, this is how we cook it here in this wooden Filipino still. And then this is, you know, so we use this and then we bring them down for a kata or tasting and share with them the most authentic. There's our open kitchen. We're right before there's some of the team. We're all. We're sort of in between. We had tours earlier. We have tours a little bit later. We do here dinner events tours.
Anyway. Did I answer your question?
[00:28:22] Speaker A: Very much so.
So do you have a place that people stay there as to or is it more stay at a hotel and then come up to visit?
[00:28:30] Speaker B: Stay in the hotel and come visit. Yeah. A restaurant's more is complicated enough.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: I can imagine.
So tell everybody a little bit about what riceia is and the. The McGee that's used. And we know the processes similar to mezcal or similar to very artisanal tequila. So what magueys are used to make ra?
[00:28:55] Speaker B: Well, there's the way I describe it, and this is again for a super well informed audience, but there's three differentiators between tequila, mezcal, ricea and baccanora. One is location, one is the raw material, one, two is raw material, and three is how it's cooked. So you know that and why this is so cool is it's a great filter as we explain racia to then explain how we make our, you know, cachoe sol tequila. But racia allows for six different species. And quite honestly, I only know how what calls them, as they call agave. Agave, sorry, Verde amarillo. Picudo Sereno. Those are four of the six. And we have 3,000 agave planted on the property. They were plant plants that came from Cabo Corrientes. We replanted them. We have between six months and 36 months. So they should start maturing in the next three years. So there's. And super important.
And this is also part of the story is about the difference between a healthy biodiversity for plants versus extremely commercialized, like in tequila. So the huelos, you know, or exact clones. And you get the way I describe it is like. It's like the scenes from the stormtroopers in Star wars where you see all the clones. That's basically when you look at a field, you see stormtroopers across the field. And so the risks, the benefits are efficiency and sugar and sort of reproduction efficiency with the equalos. The downside is the risk of the lack of the diversity. And so one of the things that's super important with this is having that species diversity, age diversity. And we will allow several of them to pop their quixotes. We'll get the seeds. We've already started a nursery with seeds from down in Cabo Credentes. So this is a farm. There's two acres of this property are agave, two acres are farmland, and then two acres of the experience you asked the question about. So we, we start in the field and we explain learning about. As you know, because you've been in the field, learning about agave when you're standing in front of agave is 10,000 times more powerful than if you're. And quite honestly, most people have never seen this crazy prehistoric looking, you know, plant. And it's fun to tell and show pictures of a pina from tequila and then show how when we harvest it here, what it looks like here.
So we do that and then we have an orno which can fit between 1 and 3 tons, which is about 1 ton, is about 140 bottles of racia. The efficiency is a production here are exactly half. We get about for pound for pound or kilo for kilo of agave. You get about half the bottles for racia. Because the process is so there's no better word than ancestral. It's just how they did it in the hills and fields. And so that's how we're doing it here. So we go through the orno, the dry cooking and something that's pretty cool. Pop a video up right now is that. And I know I believe some mezcals do this, but I certainly had never seen this before is that we do. You know, the logs go into orno. We then cover it in stones, then we stack it with the agaves, and then we cover in reeds, and then we cover in dirt.
And then in that process, we've got a small tree sort of in the center that we then pull the tree out, and there's a little chimney going in, and so we dump water in there. And why I love that is like, you know, if it's 100% dry roasted, I think the smoke imbues itself strongly into the agave. And why, I think, are some point when you. When you give me your credit card and I buy the plane ticket for you to come down, you'll taste our rice.
It's extremely. It's, like, powerful. It's flavorful, but it's, like, so clean and good. And I really think that it's a result of this steam. This sort of what I describe as a blend between a traditional mezcal cook, dry roasting, and a little bit of the steam. Because the water goes in there, we cover the hole, and boom, the water hits the rocks in there. It's just steaming the hell out of the inside. So that's what we do here. And then we have the two Filipino stills. They fit about 150 liters of mosto. And let's give it a shot. Let's just try to give it a shot and show you what the spot looks like. We're gonna do this, you and I.
[00:33:26] Speaker A: Yeah, let's do it.
[00:33:27] Speaker B: Let's do this. Go out the side. Super bright right now. Okay.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: We made it out to. We made it out to what I always called a palenque, but you're calling it something a little different.
[00:33:36] Speaker B: Taberna. Like, we would think of tavern, but it's called taberna again. This is a coastal racea.
Very different than I see it from the Sierras. You might typically see stainless steel or copper alembic still there. But this is very different.
Excuse me. So this is our orno. It's a. You can see it's got stones in it. Because below that was the.
We put this wood, lit it, covered it in stones, covered it with the palms. Sorry, it went wood, stones, agaves, palms.
And then you see this dirt ring. It's because we take shovels and dig all that dirt and bury it. We go down about a foot and a half, two feet, and really cover the whole thing. And in that process, there's a stick in the middle that we yank out and then. And then fill with we drop the water, and you see these broken stones. Well, when you dump the water in, when the water hits this hot stone, it cracks. So we have to yank the broken stones out. And we are using them in our.
There's. Anyway, so then we take the cooked agave out, and very traditionally, what they do is they don't have a molino. They don't use a wood chipper. They use what we call maha. And it's these wooden mallets. And they just. It's in. In this milling part, you can, you know, you're. You're shredding. Like we, like on our molino in matzitan. It's basically shredding and ripping, and then this is more pulverizing, like smashing. So it's very different, but that's how we release the. Like, separate the fibers. Then the fibers go into the tinacos with water. Well, water, or basically water off the property. And then they'll sit here for. The first batch we did was about two weeks. The second batch was about three and a half weeks. So it's all wild fermentation. It's impacted by the local yeast, obviously, from the dirt, from the plants, from everything. So this is our sellers right here. And we get about three and a half, 4% ABV, and then they go into the. Go ahead. Yes.
[00:35:49] Speaker A: And just to be clear for everybody, you're actually mashing down those agaves, and then you're. You're putting all of that in those tanks. The fibers and everything go right in those tanks with. Then you add water to that. And that. That's what is much different.
[00:36:03] Speaker B: You let it sit, and for about three days, it just sits. Actually, we put the agave in there, and we don't add the water for about three days. And the little yeasties are starting to get. We put some reeds in there and some stones, and we're trying to get, you know, stuff in there. And then after three days, we add the water.
[00:36:24] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:36:25] Speaker B: The first cook we did, it was two weeks. The second cook was like a really strong cook, or meaning it got more roasted. And as a result, the fermentation took longer. So batch to batch here, it's very different.
I apologize. I didn't properly set this thing up, but I guess we can get sense here. So this is the Filipino still when we do an actual distillation day.
Well, this is all handmade by Joel.
If you sort of imagine a pot still copper pot still.
What we have is a copper bowl that's set in clay adobe and bricks. And then he sliced a tree and hollowed it out and created a bowl. Then we flipped the bowl over and there that all the mosto, the agave chunks and the fermented mosto goes in there.
And then we build a fire underneath, you know, stills we distilled two times.
And then it usually comes off about 52, 53%. And we, we add water down to 48, 52, 53. Tastes amazing, but for a lot of people here, this is the first time they're ever drinking ricea. And so we wanted to soften it a little bit with some water. And I like the 48 because that's what epic strength is.
That's also my birthday or sorry, my age. So that's why I chose for you, Jimmy.
[00:37:50] Speaker A: But that was beautiful. The things we were able to see is awesome. And it gives people a really different understanding and to learn about this is really cool. The videos are going to help too. Put those videos on and show.
[00:38:01] Speaker B: I'll just show one more thing here. This is Donya Ellie.
So this is our whole open kitchen type thing. And then you see, just try to make this. We try to make this fun. I have kids, so I wanted to create a spot where adults could learn and kids can have fun. So the adults can learn and have fun too.
[00:38:24] Speaker A: So closest airport to fly there? Puerto Vallarta.
[00:38:26] Speaker B: Puerto Vallarta, yeah. Yeah. So, so this, this area is. The Puerto Vallart is a big city and it's got a lot of flights. And we're about 45 minutes north of Puerto Vallarta.
[00:38:36] Speaker A: Okay, and then how far are you from Tequila and Guadalajara?
[00:38:39] Speaker B: Yeah, so it's this area. It's exactly three hours, two hours and 45 minutes to a Matitan. And I think I sent you the photo. Like I just did the drive yesterday morning, we ran out of tequila here, so I went back to 1520 to pick some up. And man, it is. That is a beautiful drive. Every time I do it, I always do it. Weird hours, sunrise, sunset, basically. And it's just. It's such a beautiful area, Mexico.
[00:39:03] Speaker A: The pictures of the sun. I think it was sunrise when you were doing it because we were talking in the morning. Absolutely amazing. And for anybody who's never been to the. To the region itself, going either to Amatant to Tequila, the beauty of the agave fields. It's amazing. And I can't wait to come there.
[00:39:19] Speaker B: There is no replacement to going to Los Valles and. And seeing the Tequila process.
We're not trying to replace any of that, but you know, the truth is that not a lot of people have the time when they come visit here to do that. Many people do. And like real tequila does tours, we send people to him and Puerto Vallarta tastings does them out of Versailles. In Puerto Vallarta, there's a lot of great options if you have the time to get there, which we love sending people to go do. But if you don't have the time, this is a fun way to sort of dive into tequila culture, but through the herb right sea.
[00:39:54] Speaker A: I think it's perfect. Where do people find out about booking a trip to come to see you?
[00:39:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:59] Speaker A: So best way for somebody to do that.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: Cachasol tequila. Sorry. Catchasoul.com, kachas soul.com or kacha soul mx on Instagrams are really the two ways that we're out there.
And yeah, we're just, we're doing tour. It's super cool. Like the, the response has been like, I mean I've been working on this project for two years. We opened 45 days ago. And the whole thing is about. It's way more than I thought. We have an incredible team. The food is amazing. The tequila has won a few awards recently, which we're super stoked about. That is being recognized in just only 45 days in the market. And we're super stoked about the reaction to it.
[00:40:41] Speaker A: So do you help people with booking their whole trip, give recommendations of hotels, where to stay?
[00:40:46] Speaker B: I don't. I'm not really good with that. I've stayed in a lot of really shitty Airbnbs in this two years. Like literally, if you want to go to these hump hump motels, like that's all I've been staying at on a dime. But I have friends that can help if you want to have a great sunset dinner among the agave. Learn about our additive free Tequila or Racia.
[00:41:08] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, I honestly, I've told you a couple times, I can't wait to come down and try it. So I can't wait to put it together.
[00:41:14] Speaker B: This is like I'm putting it out to your whole viewership. Like the fly in the gdl. Spend a night, do a day in Los Altos, do the next day in Los Vales land. Actually, sorry, I was being a little crass. We are now developing relationship with hotels because we're bringing a lot of those guys on the property. So we. I will have great recommendations. And the whole idea I think is you do a day in Los Altos, a day in Los Baez, you come Here, a day at the beach and then dinner here and you do the tour and stuff like that. I think it would be totally rad. And then fly out a pbo.
[00:41:48] Speaker A: We will definitely make it happen. I really appreciate you sitting this tequila out.
Not. Not just, you know, regular tequila, but award winning, fantastic tequila with great unique flavors. And you've really put together something awesome here. I can't wait to get my hands on that ricea so I can see if it's the one that I drank with Jimmy. And I haven't really had a lot of ricea, and I'm really looking forward to diving into that as well.
[00:42:12] Speaker B: Yeah, just. Just on. Just on that real quick. The batches are so small, and I just have to say, this place, like these tiles you see here were from a building that was being torn down in Puerto Vallarta. The bricks were from a place in Altavista. All the stonework you see was pulled off the ground. All the furniture was milled on the property. So we're like the. All the pavers were from the mountain up there. So this whole thing is about being good stewards of the environment for happy animals, plants and humans.
And so ricea is not a commercial spirit like tequila. And that's part of the journey that people learn. It is a very, like, material intensive product. And so our production is just going to be like, just a little, because anything way bigger than that would be like, not good stewards, if you know what I mean. Like, it's pretty material intense. So, um, yeah. You tasting it?
You coming down?
[00:43:13] Speaker A: Honoring the tradition, honoring the location, and honoring the environment that makes it. I totally understand that. So I can't wait to be able to be there and sip it and. And try it and be excited about it. So I really thank you for taking your time for doing this. And I. I think this is going to be a very interesting video for a lot of people because there's a. A lot of new information and we're bringing a new brand and also an experience. So thank you for.
For doing this.
[00:43:39] Speaker B: Thank you for your time, dude. I appreciate it. And when I get the repos up there, I'll make sure to get you some.
[00:43:46] Speaker A: Can't wait to try it.
[00:43:47] Speaker B: All right, buddy.
[00:43:48] Speaker A: Thank you.
