Markets and Meadery

I’ve been interested in brewing something since I’ve arrived to Mexico, and finding out a friend here was also interested in homebrewing sealed the deal, or the keg as it may be. We started looking into homebrewing in Mexico, which in Spanish is called “cerveza casera”. While the hobby is still in its infancy here, there are still a few microbreweries around the country and a few online resources available. An expat living part-time in San Miguel de Allende keeps a blog about homebrewing in Mexico and compiled a list of the best suppliers of brewing ingredients. The online distributors are more expensive than the wholesalers, but have the advantage of coordinating the shipping. Prices on average are more expensive than the states, which is to be expected giving the much smaller demand and number of suppliers. But, I was able to find just about everything I needed for the first go around. Here are the three main online stores I looked at. Cerveza Casera has the best all around selection, and largest selection of dried yeasts.


Cerveza Casera
Homebrewing Mexico
Fermentando

Since malts and hops are significantly more expensive here in Mexico, we decided to start off what’s locally available. No, we’re not planning on starting up a mezcalaria or distillery anytime soon - although, I did find out a microfinance loan funded one of the mezcal producers in Zacatecas. Two things are relatively cheap and locally produced: honey and prickly pear. So, prickly pear mead is what it will be! Charlie Papazian, one of the most prolific homebrewer advocates in the US, has said that he brews a prickly pear mead every year and it is one of his all time favorite drinks. I’ve wanted to try a prickly pear mead since my roommates and I started brewing about a year ago, and I like the idea of using locally produced ingredients.

Tunas (prickly pear fruit) for sale in the street 

The great honey search.

Looking for mead ingredients has been a good excuse to get to know the local markets a little bit better. There are 3 or so mercados in the downtown area. Most of the venders sell either veggies, meats, or cheese. Prices are usually posted or uniformly low so there is little bargaining in the markets. There are also moving markets that occur one day a week in a fixed location called a “tianguis”. Most of the market sellers, except for maybe those in the tianguis, are not growers themselves. Much of the food is bought at the “mercado de abastos” which is on the south of town and occurs every saturday. This is when all of the growers come in from the surrounding countryside and sell their food under a massive overhang; just about everything grown under the Mexican sun can be bought there. I went this last weekend just to check it out, and ended up with a pound and a half of bright yellow anaheim peppers, pomegrantes, bell peppers, bananas, tomatillos, spearmint and basil seedlings, two pounds of oaxaca cheese, and onions. I decided to buy onions on my way out and stopped at one of the wharehouse onion dealers. They called out to me, “cebollas gringo!” And I though, sure why not. I asked them for two or three, forgetting these were the wholesale dealers. They raised their eyebrows, “2 or 3 bolsas?” they asked. I laughed and remembered what abastos was mostly for: bulk. 2 or 3 bags would be around 50 pounds of onions. Definitely too much. They laughed and ended up giving me 3 onions for free, and then gave me the flipped around wave as I walked off, which means your welcome.

Aceitilla Flower

Besides seeing abastos, I went out to buy buckets for fermenting from a plastic wholesale shop. After asking around in the markets, I was finally pointed to this store for the buckets I would need (“cubetas recicladas”). Now all that is left is to get the yeasts and honey. There are three types of honey locally produced: miel de aceitilla, miel de mesquita, miel de maguey. Miel de aceitilla is a very sweet, orangish honey, that has a floral, almost fruity flavor. The aceitilla flower is a very beautiful flower that I can’t figure out whether or not is grown in the US.  The flowers are white or orange, and are growing all over the hillside near the Development Studies office. 


Miel de maguey is actually unfermented syrup of roasted agave and has a very dark, molasses like flavor. Miel de mesquita is honey made from mesquite trees and is lighter in color and sweetness.


Talking to some of the women who sell honey on the streets, most of the honey seems to come from two people - a man at abastos named Adrian, who sells honey in abastos, and a man in the neighboring city of Guadalupe. I’m hoping that since I’ll buy in bulk, I can get a discount. But, regardless, the honey here is much cheaper than in the states. A kilo of honey (just over 2.2 pounds, almost a liter) costs 40 pesos (about US $3). Prickly pear fruit is available on every street corner in 5 different varieties. My favorites are the white fruits and the deep reds. The white/light green fruits are refreshing and taste like a sweeter green melon. I was amazed how much the red fruits taste like tangy blackberries. I think mixing honeys is the best to avoid overbearing flavors. Sweet honeys can be too strong, so I’m using the mesquite honey to mellow it down. Here are the plans:

• 4 gallons of prickly pear mead, using a blend of aceitilla honey (75%) and mesquite honey (25%)
• 2 gallons of regular mead using mesquite honey (75%) and aceitilla honey (25%)
• 2 gallons of red prickly pear mead using mesquite honey (75%) and aceitilla honey (25%)

Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find wine, champagne, or mead yeast on any of the brewing websites. I’ve been readng up online and making mead with ale yeasts is a practiced albeit unconvential strategy and can yield interesting mead. Basic Brewing Radio ran a mead experiment a few years back using 5 different strains of yeast. You can watch about their final tasting here. They used two wine yeasts, a hefeweizen yeast, a trappast belgian yeast, and an american ale yeast. While all the yeasts turned out drinkable meads, their top choices were one of the wine yeasts and the ale yeast. They even said that the ale yeast left a nice fruity flavor, which should be a good complement to the prickly pear flavor, and didn't have any of the sulfur or diacetyl problems that meads can have (cloudiness). Luckily, the ale yeast they used is one of the 15 or so yeasts available on the Mexican websites - US 1056 (called US-05 by Safale).


Some of the things that were discussed in using ale yeasts in meads: look for high alcohol tolerance (6-10%) and strong attenuation (converts a high percentage of sugars to alcohol), minimal ester output to avoid too much of a buttery or banana flavor, overall neutral affect on flavor, high flocculation to produce a clear final product, ability to break down complex sugars, and strong tolerance to varying temperatures.I decided to go with the American Ale yeast, Safale-US 05 for the meads. I’m also buying some general all purpose yeasts - Safale S-33, Nottingham - for future use. With nearly infinite number of variations that can be tried for meads, it’s almost nice to have options limited by availability.


For some of you, I'm sure that is all you ever wanted to know about mead making (besides drinking the sweet outcome of course)! I wanted to put all that down as much for my recollection as for your zymurgical...or zymagical...benefit. 

Real de Catorce (from google)

I’ve ordered all my inredients from Cerveza Casera now and they were prompt in putting together the order and sending it through Estafeta, the major Mexican shipping company. One difference with purchasing things in the states is that I had to deposit the money directly into their bank account at a branch of major Mexican bank. Use of credit cards is still not widespread here, and direct deposits are the response to this lack of financial infrastructure. When we looked into reserving a hotel for our trip this weekend to Real de Catorce, a Mexican mining town in San Luis de Potosi, they required a 50% direct deposit into their account for a reservation. While the numerical cost isn’t that different, the cost in transaction time is certainly different. We decided not to make a reservation partly because of the time it would take to walk into town and make a deposit. Either technology has made us lazier, or convenience makes us spend more. Regardless, mead in Mexico is on its way.