Santa Catarina Minas

Santa Catarina Minas is a small town in the Ocotlán district of Oaxaca's Central Valleys, at about 1,580 m, around 40 km south of Oaxaca City and a few minutes east of Ocotlán de Morelos. The town had about 1,700 residents in 2010 and is the seat of its own municipality. Its name honours its patron, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and recalls the mines in the surrounding hills that were once worked for precious metals.

Today Minas is known well beyond Oaxaca for its mezcal. The village's palenques distil in clay: after the agave hearts are roasted in an earth pit for several days, crushed by hand with wooden mallets and fermented in open wooden vats, the mash is distilled twice in small earthenware pots set over an adobe and mud stove fired with wood and spent agave fibre. A copper lid cooled with running water condenses the vapour, and a carved wooden spoon or a hollow reed carries the spirit out. The method is so tied to the town that mezcal made this way is called minero, and some producers bottle under that name.

Several families have carried the craft for generations. The Ángeles family, now in its fourth and fifth generations, makes Real Minero, and Eduardo "Lalo" Ángeles, who learned from his father in Minas, makes Lalocura; the Carlos family, starting with Florencio Carlos Sarmiento, has made the Minero sold by Del Maguey since the 1990s, and maestro Germaín Arellanes distils local wild agaves such as tobalá, tripón and barril. Visitors come mainly to see a palenque at work and taste from the source. The town also keeps a Carnaval on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, when a band tours the palenques and painted pintos join the procession.