Every bottle of Los Magos starts as a plant that nobody planted, growing in open desert, on a schedule of about fifteen years. From there it gets chopped with an axe, buried in a fire pit, fermented in the open air and run through copper three times.
Hard to make. Easy to drink. Step by step, this is how it happens.
1. Reading the land
Los Magos is made in Chihuahua, inside the sotol Denomination of Origin. Our harvesters work the grasslands, the desert flats and the mountain slopes across the extension of the DO, and they read the land the way you'd read a wine map. Sotol from high rocky ground tastes different from sotol off the flats. Mountain plants bring pine freshness and earth. Grassland plants bring the herbal side. The mineral character comes from the desert itself.
Choosing which plants to cut is a judgment call made in the field by people who've been making it for generations, and it's the single biggest input into what ends up in the glass. We're careful about how much we take from any one area, which is a whole subject of its own. More on that here.
2. Tumbar, bringing it down
The harvest is called tumbar, from the Spanish for bringing something down. A harvester works around the plant with an axe, shaving off the long serrated leaves until the core is exposed. What's left looks like a rough pineapple, which is why it's called a piña.
Roots and meristem stay in the ground. That's deliberate, and it's the difference between a harvest and a clearance. The plant regrows.
All of this is done by hand, in open country, by people carrying axes and walking a lot. There's no mechanized version of this step and there isn't going to be one.
3. Buried over a mesquite fire
The piñas go to the distillery and into an earth oven: a pit dug into the ground, lined with volcanic rock, and fired with mesquite, oak and poplar. The rocks get loaded, the fire burns down, the piñas go in, everything gets covered, and then it cooks for several days.
Roasting converts the plant's starches into fermentable sugar, and it puts smoke and earth into the raw material before a drop of alcohol exists. Wood choice matters. Pit temperature matters. The weather that week matters.
Nothing else in the process is this hard to control, and nothing else does as much for the flavor. Every producer who's tried to industrialize it has ended up with something that tastes like it was industrialized.
4. Milling, then wild yeast and open air
Cooked piñas come out of the pit and get milled into a proprietary mash, developed by our founders alongside sixth-generation sotoleros.
The mash goes into open pine fermentation vats with deep well water. Open air means wild yeast, whatever happens to be living in that building and on that fruit, doing the work. Nothing is inoculated.
Fermentation runs five to fifteen days depending on the time of year. Summer heat drives it fast. Winter makes you wait. Both give you a slightly different spirit, and we don't try to sand that variation away.
5. Three passes through copper
Traditional artisanal sotol is double distilled in copper pot stills. The first run is a stripping run that produces low wines, called vino. The second run is where the distiller cuts heads, hearts and tails, keeping the hearts.
Los Magos runs a third distillation, and there's a practical reason for it.
Sotol yields are low. One plant, one bottle, fifteen years. Pot still distillation gives you an imprecise separation of heads, hearts and tails, so a careful distiller always errs safe and lets some of the good stuff bleed out into the cuts they discard. That's a lot of value to throw away when your raw material took a decade and a half to grow.
So we take the heads and tails from the second run, mix them, and put them back through the still to cut again. The third-pass hearts get blended with the second-pass hearts. We recover more of what we worked so hard to grow, and we get a smoother, more approachable profile out of it. One reason, two outcomes.
6. Proof, glass and the bit where you drink it
Los Magos Blanco is bottled at 38% alcohol by volume, 76 proof. Sotol legally runs from 35% to 45%, and we landed on 38% deliberately. Sotol carries an unusual amount of aroma, and higher proof burns some of it off the moment it hits your nose. At 38% the citrus, the herbs and the black pepper all stay where you can find them, and the spirit works neat, on ice, or in a cocktail without renegotiating the whole drink.
Bottles are 100% blown recycled glass, made locally. That's also why no two are quite identical.
What's in the bottle is 100% sotol. No additives at any stage. Our ingredient list is short.
7. And for some of it, the barrel
Not every batch stops at blanco. The northern Chihuahuan climate is kinder to long aging than the conditions further south, so sotol can rest in wood for years without collapsing into oak.
We've aged sotol as long as twelve years, in White Oak Tennessee whiskey barrels and White Oak tequila barrels. The 6 Year Reserva spent six years in tequila barrels and came out with vanilla, clove, cinnamon, allspice and cardamom sitting on top of everything the desert put in first.
We also keep experimenting with barrel exchange programs, which is how the WhistlePig Edition happened: our sotol finished in 10 Year Rye whiskey barrels, and whiskey finished in our sotol barrels going the other direction.
Every step is somebody's trade
Someone learned each of those steps from someone else, usually a relative, usually over years.
The harvesters read the land and decide which plants are ready, knowledge that takes years in the field and doesn't write down usefully. The sotolero running the pit knows what the smoke should smell like on day three. The master distiller makes the cuts by nose and by feel, on a still with no automation on it anywhere. The glassblowers who make our bottles work a few miles from the distillery.
Our founders, Juan Pablo Carvajal and Eduardo Almanza, are native Chihuahuans, and Los Magos exists because they went looking for the people already doing this well and asked to learn. The proprietary mash behind the Blanco came out of that collaboration with sixth-generation sotoleros.
Their stories are our story. On this brand that line describes the supply chain.
Why no two batches are identical
Wild plants from different ground. Wood that burns a little differently every time. Wild yeast that changes with the season. Fermentation that takes five days in July and fifteen in January.
A big producer would spend real money engineering all of that out. We keep it, within limits, because that variation is what we're selling. The triple distillation and careful blending give us a consistent house profile you can recognize across bottles, and underneath it the desert still gets a vote.
Why any of this matters
You can taste process. A spirit made from a wild plant, cooked in the ground over mesquite, fermented on wild yeast and distilled in copper by people whose grandparents did the same thing carries all of that into the glass. The alternative is a spirit that tastes like a factory, and there's plenty of that on the shelf already.
Fifteen years in the ground, several days in a fire pit, up to two weeks of fermentation, three trips through a copper still. All of it for one bottle.
Seems fair to actually open it.
Shop Los Magos Sotol Blanco →
$57. 38% alcohol by volume, 76 proof. Wild harvested, triple distilled, zero additives.
Want the background first? Read what sotol actually is, or see how it compares to tequila and mezcal.