What is tequila worm

To limit confusion, jimadores ranchers who harvest the plant by hand using long, sword-like knives would pluck the bugs from dead or dying agave plants and place them in bottles of mezcal. Many little towns around the country, rural people, poor people, they only have lands and part of the belief has been from generation to generation. So perhaps their grandfather or their great-grandfather does that.

But there is a keyword worth noting in his observation: marketing. Tequila was first exported in the s, and in the s, Nacional Vinicola was the first company to add the attention-grabbing creepy-crawler to the bottles.

But they were using the worm for marketing and for flavors because they are making some salts with the worm. Nowadays, you can use the orange at the end of the tasting with worm salt, or worm with chili powder.

This moment is now for the ritual. The questions remains: If you do run across one of these increasingly rare little larva buddies, should you eat it? That lovely little critter is in the bottom of mezcal bottles, not tequila. So, technically, it is a mezcal worm, not a tequila worm, because it is only found lying there dead in the bottom of a bottle of mezcal.

To further complicate the matter, tequila is a special type of mezcal. So, back to the drowned worm. The worm is a moth larva, gusano de maguey. It feeds on the maguey plant. It would have turned into a Mariposa moth, but hey, it is in the bottle of mezcal instead.

Word has it a former art student-turned-mezcal entrepreneur named Jacobo Lozano Paez got the idea to actually put the gusano into the bottle of finished mezca l after realizing that the gusano changed the flavor of the spirit.

Since gusano feed on the maguey plant, it happened that sometimes a heart would be roasted with worms in it; this is, again supposedly, where Paez got the idea. Tequila was flooding the U. From here, ideas that the gusano indicated purity a strong, pure mezcal would keep the worm intact or could impart virility or good fortune were just a matter of some marketing imagination.