Tomás García Cruz

Eldest son to legendary mezcalero Don Nicolás, and brother of Celso and Cándido, Tomás was born in 1950, on the same land he and his family proudly maintain today. For more than five generations, the family has been respected as a power-house of local production, as well as the keepers of knowledge and expertise that have continued to help us at Neta shape our understanding of both the realities and contexts at play in the district of Miahuatlán. Most of the family’s productions these days are made collectively between Don Tomás and his adult sons, Juan, Nicolás, and Eliazar, using homegrown maguey, or wild agaves collected from their lands. Utilizing an extensive web of long-standing local relationships, the family does sometime work with fully ripe capon or quiotudo plants acquired from other master growers in the surrounding community-  either purchased outright, or worked a medias, a traditional practice in which the production and/or profits are split between the grower and the distiller.

Tomas first starting working in his family palenque at age 12, under the tutelage of his father, and began to produce on his own at 20, two years before marrying his wife, Antonia, in 1972. At that time, the majority of mezcal production remained prohibited and took place in clandestine locations, such as remote streams and difficult-to-access riverbanks. In Logoche, maceration was done manually with wood mallets, and the fermentation vessels, known as canoas, were made from hallowed-out trees before design changes led to the upright Montezuma cypress sabino tanks that are used today. Likewise, with the combined increased availability of tools and technology, and mezcal’s evolving legal status, the clay pots that were once commonly utilized in illicit production began to fall out of favor, and were slowly replaced by steel drums and copper pot stills with refrescadera cooling jackets that required only a single round of distillation to yield a high-proof spirit.

Agave was harvested as it is today, by hand, but hauled out exclusively by wooden carts and beasts of burden. Major changes arrived again in the early 1990s, spurring a return to double distillation technology, with pots and serpentines made from copper. Tomás has operated his own palenque since 1996, adjacent to his home, where he and his family work regularly throughout the warm months of the year, in sync with their rest of their agricultural calendar.

Rooted in tradition, but always open to experimentation and innovation on his own terms, Tomás began to participate in government-sponsored programs and workshops. Focused on a variety of subjects including new methods in agave cultivation and different distillation techniques, Tomás began to selectively apply new ideas to some of his traditional practices. One of the greatest examples was the building of an agave nursery in 1996, the first of its kind in Logoche. That summer, he let a handful of Espadín plants mature, let the quiotes (flowering stock) develop, hauled out a ladder, and plucked the un-pollenated flowers from the stalks, prompting the development of bulbils. (Bulbils are small bulb-shaped growths from which a new plant can grow.) Tomas then grew out 12,000 of these clones and sold them eight months later, earning enough to buy a pickup truck - another first in Logoche. This set a trend; today nearly every family cultivates a rich variety of different agave species and subspecies, all of which begin their lives in well-tended and managed nurseries which are replanted from both seed and bulbils every year. Such cultivation encourages healthy ecosystems and ensures the conservation of numerous micro-endemic species of agaves, and importantly, the preservation of locally preferred flavors and styles of production.

Soil types: colorada, roja, cascajo,blanca and negra

Oven: 10-ton capacity, conical, earthen oven

Mashing: Machete and shredder

Fermentation: 8 Montezuma cypress wood tanks. 1000 - 1200 liter capacity.

Distillation: Tomás and family use three different copper pot stills, one with a 250-liter boiler capacity and a second 300-liter capacity copper pot, both with copper caps, arms, and serpentines. The third still is composed of a third 300-liter capacity pot mounted with a tall, cylindrical stainless-steel cap equipped with a thermometer that allows the palenquero to monitor the temperature during distillation. This third still has become preferred for the refining (second round of distillation) at the García Vasquez family palenque. Recipes have evolved, but today all of the family’s batches are double-distilled. The smithing is done with the heads (puntas), the heart (cuerpo or corazon), and at times, a select cut of the tails (colas or común), depending on what the maestros deem appropriate based upon their expertise.