Pulque: A 2,000-Year-Old Sacred Mesoamerican Booze

Authored by Ross Pomeroy via RealClearScience,

The Mexica people ruled the Aztec Empire in the Valley of Mexico for its roughly 90-year duration between the 15th and 16th centuries. Mexica mythology tells of an intoxicated deity, Ometochtli, whose drink of choice was pulque. White and viscous, with a strong, yeasty odor of slightly spoiled buttermilk, pulque is produced through fermenting a sugary sap known as aguamiel, extracted from certain species of Agave plant. According to myth, the goddess Mayehuatzin, Ometochtli’s sister, provided the aguamiel and plied him with his favorite fermented booze.

While pulque is today little known outside of Mexico, it has deep roots in human history, tracing back 2,000 years in Mesoamerica. Researchers at the Escuela Superior de Medicina del Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico City recently explored its longstanding significance in a paper published to the journal histories.

The Mexica may have been most fond of pulque, but the Teotihuacanos, Otomies, Zapotecas, Mixtecas, and Maya also consumed it. „Anthropological evidence, including pottery, murals, codices, chronicles, and oral cosmological traditions, suggests that this… alcoholic beverage was already part of the diet of the inhabitants of Teotihuacan,” the authors wrote. „Pulque is therefore one of the oldest, if not the most important, fermented beverages in Mesoamerican history.”

One of the reasons pulque is relatively overlooked compared to other fermented beverages, such as kombucha (originating in ancient China) and kefir (hailing from the North Caucasus), is its exceedingly brief shelf life. Naturally fermented in an enclosed container over 12 to 24 hours, it reaches an alcohol concentration comparable to beer – roughly 4 percent to 6 percent – then rapidly spoils over the next 24 to 36 hours.

Its transience made it a sacred drink and divine gift in ancient Mesoamerican cultures. „It was highly esteemed and reserved for the nobility and priesthood, who consumed it during ceremonial and religious rituals,” the researchers described.

Today, pulque’s transience makes it difficult to export and sell. While the Spanish conquistadors enjoyed it (and its intoxicating effects) after conquering the Aztecs, pulque over time fell out of favor compared to longer-lasting beer, tequila, and wine. European rulers also carried out a coordinated smear campaign against pulque in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

„This anti-pulque campaign, orchestrated by political elites, stigmatized the drink, its producers, and its consumers, depicting it as unsanitary and associated with poverty, indigeneity, and illiteracy,” the authors wrote.

Currently enjoyed by locals and tourists in Mexico, pulque hasn’t found widespread fandom anywhere else. Pasteurized versions – which last for months – do exist, but food writers express that the experience isn’t remotely the same.

„It’s the original active fermented beverage which will simply go bad after a few days so it’s truly a locavore phenomenon,” Max Garrone wrote for Flaviar.

As for the flavor, award-winning food writer Naomi Tomky calls it „intriguingly zingy.”

„Natural or plain, pulque is an opaque milky color but fizzy and bright on the tongue. Sweet, but not cloying, lightly viscous but not slimy, and just ever-so-subtly yeasty, like the whiff of freshly risen bread dough hitting the oven.”