The tequila agaveAgave Tequilana Weber Azul, often called blue agave, is an agave, a principal economic product of Jalisco state in Mexico due to its role as the base ingredient of tequila, a popular alcoholic drink.
The tequila agave grows natively in Jalisco, favoring the high altitudes (over 1500 meters) and sandy soil. Commercial and wild agaves have very different life cycles. Both start as a large succulent, with spiky fleshy leaves, which can grow to over two meters in length. Wild agaves sprout a shoot when about five years old which grows into a stem up to five meters tall and topped with yellow flowers. The flowers are pollinated by a native bat (Leptonycteris nivalis) and produce several thousand seeds per plant. The shoots are removed when about a year old from commercial plants to allow the heart to grow larger. The plants are then reproduced by planting these shoots; this has lead to a considerable loss of genetic diversity in cultivated blue agave.
Tequila is produced by removing the heart of the plant in its twelfth year, normally weighing between 35-90 kg. This heart is stripped of leaves and heated to remove the sap, which is fermented and distilled. Other beverages like Mezcal and Pulque are also produced from Blue and other agaves by different methods (though still using the sap) and are regarded as more traditional.
Over 200 million Blue Agave plants are grown in several regions of Mexico, but in recent years the ability of farmers to meet demand has been in question. Through poor breeding practices, Blue Agave has lost resistance to fusarium fungus and several other diseases which currently render 25%-30% of the plants unusable for consumption.
Today, over 90,000 acres of blue agave are under cultivation in posteros, or pastures, in the tequila-growing region of Mexico with the greatest concentration near the town of Tequila.
Agave fields are planted from mecuates, small offshoots growing from the base of adult plants, but they can also be grown from seed.
In actuality, blue agave is the single-most important crop in western Mexico due to its major role in the tequila industry.
Agaves are succulent plants of a large botanical genus of the same name, belonging to the family Agavaceae.
Agave americana, century plant, was introduced into Europe about the middle of the 16th century and is now widely cultivated for its handsome appearance; in the variegated forms the leaf has a white or yellow marginal or central stripe from base to apex.
Agaves have long presented special difficulties for taxonomy; variations within a species may be considerable, and a number of named species are of unknown origin, and may just be variants of original wild species.
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