2024-10-12
10 分钟Yola Jimenez launched Yola Mezcal to preserve her family’s traditional recipe of the spirit from Oaxaca, Mexico. Today the brand is thriving thanks to her commitment to slow growth, sustainable production and staying true to its original roots. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hello, I'm Laura Kramer.
This week we head to Oaxaca in Mexico for a drink in the sun.
Yola Jimenez is the founder of Yola Mezcal, an artisanal brand that follows her family's traditional recipe of the spirit dating back to 1971 and passed down from her grandfather.
Today, Yola Mezcal is handmade in Mexico, bottled at an all female facility and has grown into a global brand while staying true to its roots.
So how do you preserve family tradition in such a fast growing industry?
And how do you balance sustainability with expanding on an international scale?
Here is Yola with more on how the journey began.
Hizal Mezcal came from growing up in a region where mezcal was just an everyday part of life.
Every family in the regions of Oaxaca or all of Oaxaca really have their own family recipe.
For me, the most important thing was to keep the recipe, to keep the traditional mezcal, which I thought it was getting lost with this big explosion that mezcal had all of a sudden.
Growing up in Oaxaca, you would find delicious mezcal everywhere.
And I knew how much it was a part of people's lives and I knew the stories from my grandfather.
But in Mexico City, we couldn't find people didn't have any sort of respect for it, and it was considered a very cheap peasant's drink.
So I was shocked.
As I was getting older and learning more about it and even hearing from chefs and different people in Mexico City, I was shocked that that was what the story behind it, it just seemed so different from the experience that I had.
And I thought it was weird that tequila, who's a type of mezcal that just, you know, from a particular place, was a very famous drink.
And that always seemed strange.