While on an annual dove hunting trip with colleagues from the outdoor and distilling industries, Marfa Spirit Co cofounder Morgan Weber detoured to the pool at their Brownsville Airbnb to cool off. It was a sweltering afternoon in September 2022, and Weber and his friends from Duck Camp, an Austin-based apparel brand, made the executive decision that the birds could wait.
“The conversation organically turned to, ‘What if we made a collaborative, regionally appropriate spirit that somehow incorporated hunting into it?’” Weber says.
Enjoying this article?Since opening in 2021, Marfa Spirit Co has produced its own version of sotol, a Mexican Denomination of Origin spirit native to Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango. Made from the plant of the same name, it’s a distillate similar to mezcal, where the cabezas, or hearts, are roasted in an underground oven, pulverized to extract the juice, and fermented in wooden vats. A botanical cousin to agave, sotol characteristically has vibrant grassy and peppery notes.
Although sotol is indisputably a Mexican product first introduced by Indigenous tribes, Texas has produced its own interpretation since the early 20th century. No one has led the domestic effort quite like Marfa Spirit Co, which hand-harvests its sotol from Marfa’s Cibolo Creek Ranch—a 30,000-acre cattle property and hunting lodge established in the mid-18th century.
The outcome of the poolside chat in 2022 was to expand upon that idea. An offshoot of standard sotol and mezcal, pechuga is a style traditionally made in Oaxaca that’s used to mark celebrations, holidays, and religious ceremonies. Made by suspending raw meat—typically chicken or turkey breast—above the still, the ascending vapor cooks the protein while allowing the fat and juices from the meat to drip back into the distillate. Spanish for “poultry breast,” pechuga has a savory, slightly viscous quality that incorporates the flavors of the local fruit, nuts, grains, and other botanicals that round out its construction.
“The informal definition of a pechuga is the story of a locale in a bottle,” says Kate Nye, Marfa Spirit Co’s consultant and former operations manager. “It really taps into the old saying, ‘What grows together goes together.’”
For their own Texas-style iteration, the group settled on using native ingredients like prickly pear, indigenous juniper berries from Fort Davis, and even native elk meat drawn from Cibolo Creek Ranch’s free-roaming elk population. The animals eat the tender young sotol blades, as do the resident javelina and mule deer on the West Texas land. Additionally, the property is rife with prickly pear and edible ocotillo and cholla blossoms. “Cibolo offered a lot of options in terms of developing a profile for the spirit,” Weber says. “This project hit on everything we’re about.”
Although it is unknown when the first pechuga was introduced in Mexico, some researchers believe the spirit has been made for at least a century. Even today, it’s difficult to find sotol pechuga outside of its native country. Additionally, recipes vary from village to village and are typically passed down orally, so producing one stateside proved especially challenging. To help with that Herculean effort, Weber consulted with Don “Lalo” Eduardo Arrieta, a distiller for Chihuahua’s Nocheluna Sotol.
Guiding them through the labor-intensive, three-distillation process to help refine and remove unwanted compounds, Arrieta helped the Texas group ultimately forge a spirit that embodies the high desert landscape. Called Desert Pechuga, it’s bold, creamy, and herbaceous, with notes of black pepper and ripe stone fruit. One of only two pechugas currently made in the U.S., the Marfa Spirit Co product is the culmination of a collective dream, one that celebrates the region and its Mexican heritage.
Luckily for Texans who might’ve missed out on their first attempt in 2024, Weber promises it’s going to become an annual tradition going forward. “West Texas cultivates peaches and pecans,” he says. “Maybe next time we’ll use those with javelina, aoudad, or quail. That would definitely be fun.”
Find Desert Pechuga at the Marfa Spirit Co tasting room and select independent liquor stores. themarfaspirit.com
