Meet the mezcalera of February 2022, Adela del Carmen Cruz Antonio. Adela started asking questions about mezcal when she was just 5 years old, but being an only child prevented her from engaging in the process until she turned 11 and her parents had a second child. She remembers that many of her father’s friends told him to not teach her about mezcal. “She should be in the kitchen making tortillas, ” they would tell him. But she was relentless and at 11 she was already actively participating in mezcal production, doing her first batches. Now she has more than ten years of experience and is happy to consider herself a maestra. Even if she is knowledgeable about every part of the process she is not shy about admitting that men are needed in the process: “Men are like agaves, you need them to make mezcal”.
