Cinco Sentidos Espadín Puntas, Eduardo 'Lalo' Perez Cortez

Most mezcal you'll find sits around 45 to 48 percent ABV. This bottle from Eduardo "Lalo" Pérez Cortés clocks in near 58 percent because it's puntas — the high-proof heads cut from the first moments of distillation, separated and bottled on their own. It's an old-school practice that fewer and fewer palenqueros bother with, but Lalo and his father Eleuterio "Tío Tello" Pérez Ramos have been making mezcal this way for five generations at their family palenque in El Nanche, a village in the Miahuatlán district of Oaxaca's Sierra Sur. The agave here is Espadín, typically harvested around ten years of maturity. Lalo roasts the piñas in a traditional underground earthen pit, then hand-mashes them with wooden hammers rather than using a tahona wheel or mechanical shredder. Fermentation happens in wooden vats made from cypress or pine, relying on wild yeasts from the air and well water from the property. The double distillation takes place in small copper alembic stills, and that's where the puntas are pulled — the most volatile, aromatic, intensely flavored fraction of the run. What you get in the glass is mineral-forward and bright, with citrus peel, stone fruit, smoke, and a vegetal backbone that holds up to the proof. There's a concentrated sweetness and herbal bite that standard-strength Espadín can't quite deliver, along with an unmistakable alcohol warmth that never feels harsh if you give it a moment to open. This is a sipping mezcal for people who like their spirits unfiltered and unapologetic, though it also works beautifully in a split-base cocktail where you want serious agave presence without drowning everything else out. Cinco Sentidos was founded by Jason Cox to spotlight individual producers like Lalo, printing their names on every label and sharing ten percent of profits back to the palenque. You can learn more about the project and the other mezcaleros we carry from Cinco Sentidos on our producer page. If you're in Lincoln Park and want to explore what puntas actually taste like, this is the bottle to start with.