Mexican Agave Beer (Pulque)

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From Drink Plants of the North American Indians by Valery Harvard, 1896.

In Mexico, the Maguey (Agave Americana) has been cultivated from time immemorial for the abundant sap, or aguamiel, which collects in the cavity made in the heart of the plant by the removal of the young central leaves and is then fermented into pulque, the national drink of Mexico.

Pulque smells much like half turned buttermilk, but is cooling, refreshing, nutritious and stimulating. It contains 3 to 4 per cent. of alcohol and is therefore about as strong as beer. The historian Sahagun says that long before the conquest, the use and abuse of pulque were so general that one of the Aztec kings forbade the sale of it and punished drunkenness with death. The Mexican liquor, mescal, or vino mescal, manufactured by distillation from the baked, pounded and fermented heads of several species of Agave, was unknown to the Aztecs, who like other American [peoples] were ignorant of distillation, an art introduced from Europe. They only knew the first part of the process, how to macerate and boil the baked heads in water and ferment the decoction, so as to obtain a sort of “mescal beer” which, however, does not appear to have been a popular beverage.

The discovery, in some parts of Mexico, of crude stills constructed of native material, has led some authors to think that distillation may have been practiced on this continent before the coming of Columbus, but there is no ground for such belief in the accounts of the first explorers nor in the Indian traditions.

Agave Americana does not grow naturally north of Mexico. Of our few native species of Agave, none produce the abundant sap necessary for the making of pulque, and they are mostly used for food purposes. The Indians of Arizona and New Mexico, however, according to Col. Cremony, who lived several years among them before our Civil War, knew then how to prepare “mescal beer" from the heads of Agave Parryi and A. Palmeri.

Havard, Valery, 1846-1927. Drink Plants of the North American Indians. New York: Torrey Botanical Club, 1896.

Valery Harvard

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