5 Sentidos Espadin con Mandarina (Off Premise Private Batch) 49.3% ALC./ VOL. 750ml

Eduardo "Lalo" Pérez Cortés distilled this 62-liter batch of Espadín con Mandarina in the weeks before Día de Los Muertos 2025, bottling it exclusively for Off Premise to mark his first visit to Chicago in January 2026. The 5 Sentidos private batch layers ripe mandarin oranges and cempasúchil flowers—the marigolds traditionally laid for the Day of the Dead—into a highland Espadín base from Miahuatlán in Oaxaca's Sierra Sur. At 49.3% alcohol, the expression sits firmly in the agave-spirits wheelhouse where fruit and flower distillates can hold their shape without collapsing into sweetness. Lalo roasted mature Espadín agave in an underground conical oven for eight days over mesquite, then crushed the piñas by hand with wooden mallets and machetes to preserve fiber structure. The mash dry-fermented for three days before he added well water and extended fermentation for fifteen more—a long, slow microbial build that extracts deep vegetal complexity. The first distillation in a copper alembic still produced the intermediate spirit called xixe. For the second distillation, Lalo added roughly thirty kilograms of peeled, de-seeded mandarin oranges and cempasúchil flowers directly into the boiling chamber of the still, distilling them together with the xixe to create a co-distillate rather than an infusion. The result is aromatic integration at the molecular level: the citrus oils and floral esters are carried over in vapor, not steeped afterward. The nose delivers roasted agave smoke braided with bright mandarin peel and a faint honeyed note from the marigold. The palate is earthy and citric in equal measure—expect white pepper, charred mesquite, candied orange, and a floral lift that reads somewhere between chamomile and calendula. The finish is long, lightly bitter, and saline, with the agave returning after the fruit fades. Drink this mezcal neat to appreciate the layering, or pair it with mole negro, roasted duck, or a dark-chocolate dessert spiked with orange zest. This is the kind of small-production experiment that defines the 5 Sentidos catalog, a curated label founded by Jason Cox at El Destilado restaurant in Oaxaca City that names the mezcalero, village, agave species, still type, and batch on every bottle.