Pal'alma Higo Puebla Destilado de Agave 750ml

Pal'alma is the export label for Almamezcalera, the Mexico City-based project of Erick Rodriguez, known among agave enthusiasts as the Indiana Jones of Mezcal for his relentless travels through more than twenty Mexican states in search of overlooked producers and rare agave varieties. This bottling is a close collaboration between Rodriguez and maestra mezcalera Asunción Matilda Vargas, who distills in the town of Tepeojuma, Puebla, working from a personal, story-driven idea rather than a standard house recipe.

The inspiration traces back to 2018, when Rodriguez tasted water steeped for days with fig leaves during a visit to Noma in Copenhagen, an experience that stuck with him given the fig tree growing outside his own home in Mexico City. He and Vargas later built a mezcal around that memory using 100% Espadilla agave, capón, or castrated, a full year before harvest to concentrate its sugars. The piñas are slow cooked in a traditional earthen and stone pit oven, then milled by hand with an axe and fermented in a shallow stone well. Distillation happens twice through a hybrid Filipino-style still of clay and wood fitted with a copper external condenser, with fresh fig leaves and halved figs added during the second run. The spirit then rests nearly six years before bottling.

Given the fig leaf and fresh fig infusion and its long rest, the spirit leans toward jammy dried fruit and honeyed sweetness, layered with a leafy, herbal green note underneath roasted agave and earth, unwinding into a long, mellow finish.