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can i have my worms

on the side please?

"It is said that the one who eats the worm will have good fortune"

Yeh, Right! I'll stick to my rabbit's foot and four leaf clover, neither of which I have to eat.
There are a variety of foreign substances put into liquor bottles but by far the best know is the worm
in Mezcal bottles. In a future article or articles I will show you some of the others.

Let me confess that I have never even tried Mezcal but, even if I did,
eating the worm holds no attractions. Yes, I am sure, like most insects
it will be full of protein but, like most Westerners, eating insects is not
something I want to do. Yes, I know that worms are not insects but the
Mezcal worm is not a actually a worm. It is a caterpillar, the larval form
of the moth Hypopta Agavis.

There are various stories as to how producers came to put the worm (gusano in
Spanish) into bottles of Mezcal. Stories say Aztec priests added the gusano to
pulque and that the gusano in Mezcal continues that tradition. Other tales say it was
used to test the strength of the Mezcal in an age when innkeepers sold weak booze
- the dead gusano proved the Mezcal had enough alcohol in it. None of these tales
has been proven through historical record. The following is the one I believe to be
true.

In 1940 Jacobo Lozano Páez moved to Mexico City
from Parras, Coahuila, Mexico to study painting in the
National School of Arts of San Carlos. He got a job at La
Minita, an old established liquor store in downtown
Mexico City . Working at the liquor store included
bottling Mezcal and this changed his aspirations from
artistic to entrepreneurial and he became a successful
bottler and trader of Mezcal.

Jacobo met his future wife working in the liquor store
and in 1942 they started a small bottling operation,
Atlántida, which his wife ran. They collected used bottles and cleaned
them for their operation. The couple bought Mezcal from the Méndez
family in Matatlan, Oaxaca.

In 1950 Jacobo discovered that the maguey (agave) worms gave the Mezcal a different flavour. This
was because his distiller was using poor quality or poorly cared for cacti. When the plants were cut a
lot of the worms remained in the heart and were cooked with the plant material.

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