The slow process of cooking the piñas in conical stone and wood ovens submerged two meters deep is a distinctive aspect of mezcal. It is its cooking, which extends over several days, that gives mezcal the smoky stamp that characterizes it. The Lost Explorer Mezcal is cooked in conical earthen ovens with river stones and volcanic rocks, covered with local wood and awnings that keep the heat in. On the other hand, tequila is normally baked using industrial methods such as brick oven, autoclave or diffuser. The brick oven is the traditional method of cooking Tequilana Weber blue agave and the process takes about three days. An autoclave is a large metal chamber that allows faster cooking of agaves and work with larger batches of raw material. A diffuser, used in most industrialized tequila production processes, is a machine the size of a small room that uses pressurized water and, in some cases, chemicals to extract the sugars from the agave fibers.

And while both mezcal and tequila can be aged after distillation, mezcal typically rests for less time than tequila. In tequila, aging is precisely one of the factors that producers take advantage of to improve flavor. With mezcal, on the other hand, we have a wide variety of species to explore.