EL BARRO
Excellent & affordable clay-finished mezcal!
Read Spear got tired of being served indifferent (or worse) mezcals in cocktails . He was inspired to figure out a way to make a really
good clay-distilled mezcal that bars could afford to use in drinks and that consumers could buy
easily. El Barro is amazing mezcal for the price.
Read Spear worked with Carlos Mendez Blas in Santiago Matatlan to set up four clay potstills dedicated to affordable small-batch clay-finished mezcal. He called it El Barro (“The Clay”).
Clay potstills are ancestral and very small. The clay makes the mezcal taste soft, with a nice colloidal mouthfeel. Every part of the distillation is done by hand. These are at the family distillery of Heladio Lopez
Everyone knows that clay distillation is best, but it is slow, time-consuming, and yields tiny batches. Clay-distilled mezcal is usually expensive
Read set it up so that El Barro has its first distillation in a larger copper potstill. The second distillation was set up in these four clay stills, which can be efficiently run all at the same time
The distiller is maestro Ricardo Ruiz.
Here’s Ricardo at work
A finished batch from one of these stills is tiny, only about enough to fill 40 bottles of mezcal.
The label you’re looking at was one of only 40 bottles from a single batch of clay-finished mezcal. As Mezcal Reviews said, El Barro is “Really delicious mezcal for the price”
Bars and restaurants can order an entire single batch of 30 1-liter bottles, exclusive to them, at an amazing price. Here’s one of them:
Ansley Coale's tasting notes on El Barro
https://craftdistillers.com/products/cuenta-cuentos/
Here’s a 2-minute YouTube explaining how a clay potstill works: https://www.google.com/
search?q=how+a+clay+potstill+works&rlz=1C5MACD_enUS1030US1030&oq=how+a+-