60 Minutes - Wood to Whiskey, The Tequila Heist, The Mezcaleros

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

With a history spanning 2,000 years and still playing a vital role in global commerce, the oak barrel, as correspondent Bill Whitaker discovers, is much more than just a container. Barrels are a vital ingredient, especially in the production of Bourbon whiskey – giving it all of its distinctive color and much of its taste. Whitaker takes us inside the largest maker of wooden barrels to glimpse the magic and mystique of this essential tradition. International crime groups are finding new, sophisticated ways to infiltrate the global supply chain online, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars of goods per year. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi reports on the growing threat of cargo theft and how 24,000 bottles of Guy Fieri’s tequila vanished on their way to the warehouse. Mezcal is having its moment. This handcrafted Mexican spirit, made from agave, has seen exponential growth in popularity and production. Correspondent Cecilia Vega travels to Oaxaca’s countryside and meets the mezcaleros laboring to quench the world’s thirst for mezcal. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully, make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. On this special edition of 60 Minutes Presents, Cheers. Tonight, we explore the fascinating life of the whiskey barrel,

an ancient product that still plays a vital role in global commerce. Millions of new oak barrels are built in America every year, fired up and then filled with what will become bourbon through years of aging, as the wood delivers magic to the whiskey. This story involves a celebrity chef, a rock star, and a highway heist that even Hollywood couldn't dream up. Well, when the president of your company calls you, says, you're not going to believe this, but he lost two truckloads of Sonto Tequila. Lost. I said, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, is this a hijacking?

Not quite. International cyber criminals have found new ways to steal hundreds of millions of dollars of goods. It looks like a Costco in here. You've got everything. Yes. Artisanal mescal resists machinery. The agave is roasted in underground pits for days. Then it's crushed by horse-drawn mill.

The mash is fermented in wooden barrels and distilled twice in copper vats. No temperature dials or controls. Bubbles indicate the alcohol content. Who knows more about the process? I think he may know more, but I drink it more. Good evening. I'm Bill Whitaker. Welcome to 60 Minutes Presents. During this holiday season when there's no shortage of toasting, we thought we'd share a few stories about the spirits behind the cheers. We'll take you to Mexico to see how mescal is made, and we'll bring you. along as a tequila heist is investigated. But we begin with whiskey and one of its essential elements. If someone asked you to name a product that was first made 2,000 years ago, still

looks and works as it always has, and still plays a vital role in global commerce, would you be stumped? It turns out the answer is the simple wooden barrel. Almost always made of oak, barrels have a long and fascinating history. First, built and used by the Celts and Romans, they have held nearly every commodity over the centuries. Metal and plastic and cardboard long ago eclipsed barrels for the shipment of most items, but as we first reported earlier this year, when it comes to wine and whiskey, especially bourbon whiskey, the oak barrel still rains, not just as a container, but for the magic that the wood gives to the whiskey. We were speaking with someone, and they called a whiskey barrel a breathing time machine.

I love that. Brad Boswell is the CEO of Independent Stave, the largest maker of wooden barrels in the world. Brad's great-grandfather founded the company in 1912 in Missouri. It now has operations worldwide. We met him in Kentucky. Most of our barrels would have a useful life of 50-plus years. 50-plus years. 50-plus years, yeah.

Like, I'll go to different places and look at barrels at distilleries or wineries around the world, and I can see barrels that my grandfather made, you know, in the 1960s. I still see him. A barrel begins as a log from a white oak tree. fed into what's known as a stave mill, where it's cut into ever smaller pieces, staves, which are then arranged in huge Jenga-style stacks

and seasoned outdoors for three to six months before heading to a nearby Cooperage, where the barrels are built. There's no nails, we'll go here, no glue. Brad Boswell's newest coopage produces thousands of barrels every day. How many of these go into it? typically between 28 and 32 stays per barrel. After a barrel is raised, mostly by hand,

it travels through a host of other steps and checks to make it ready to begin its life, including being toasted and then charred on the inside. Most of the barrels we make there bespoke. We know exactly who this barrel is going to, which is the dollar. How about that? The demand for such a huge volume of barrels can be attributed mainly to one thing,

bourbon. President Franklin Roosevelt in the 30s became more specific about what bourbon and whiskey should be. And at that time he said, you know, bourbon should be in new, charred oak barrels. So if it's not in one of these barrels, it's not bourbon.

That's correct. Bourbon has to be aged in a new charred oak container. That rule, plus booming consumer demand for bourbon starting in the early 2000, in the early 2000s has been very good for the barrel business. 3.2 million new barrels were filled with whiskey last year in Kentucky alone, and more than 14 million full barrels are aging in the state in massive warehouses known as rickhouses.

How many barrels are in this rickhouse? 23,500 on six floors. Dan Calloway is the master-border. for Bardstown Bourbon, a young but fast-growing Kentucky distillery. To make a great whiskey, you have to start with a great distillate, a clear spirit, but then the magic comes from the barrel. The fact that it's new charred oak, it's just incredible. So the barrel is crucial to your product.

Absolutely, depending who you talk to, some would say 50% of the flavor, maybe up to 70, 80% of the characters derived from that barrel. The rest of the flavor comes from what's known as the flavor. from what's known as the Mash Bill, grains like corn and wheat and rye that are mixed with water and fermented with yeast. Despite Bourbon, having recently been threatened or hit with tariffs by other countries

in retaliation for President Trump's tariffs, Bardstown's huge distillery is still producing enough new whiskey to fill more than 5,000 barrels a week. You take the clear liquid, which is basically what people call moonshine, goes through this process and comes out as this beautiful, brown, tasty liquid here. How does that happen? Yeah, so I always compare it to a seesaw.

Okay? So when it comes off the still, moonshine, like you said, it's a seesaw that's out of balance. But every year that goes by of the barrel aging, the seesaw comes into balance. And what the barrel is bringing is caramel, vanilla, baking spice, and all this rich, beautiful color. How can solid oak produce all those flavors and spices? Back where the barrels are built, Brad Boswell gave us a vivid lesson with a barrel that had just been toasted, a process that brings sugars in the wood to the surface. Smell that. I mean...

That does smell delicious. It's incredible. It really does. It's amazing. There's a reason why people still use oak barrels 2,000 years later. So when I'm sipping the bourbon, I'm sipping this barrel. That's right. Absolutely.

After toasting, we and the barrels move to the visually stunning char oven. So we'll see this barrel coming through right here. Oh, look at that. Yeah, so actually the inside of the barrel is on fire. Okay, you just light the barrel on fire.

Yep, we light the barrel on fire. and that teases out more and more of the flavors. And we call that an alligator charred because the inside of the barrel actually looks like kind of an alligator's back. And you can see... We could see that blistering inside a newly charred barrel pulled off the line.

I mean, people, you know, expect this to smell like a campfire. It smells more like a confectionery product. It does. I can smell the caramel and the vanilla. Yeah. What that barrel can give to the whiskey is evident in these glasses. So this is the same.

exact distillate that came off the still at the exact same time went into a barrel four years later and this we just kept in a glass bottle it's also apparent in the taste first the white lightning wow that gives a punch yes it does it does and then the barrel-aged bourbon oh big difference huge difference smooth oh smooth some of that smooth comes from temperature swings in the rickhouses according to Bardstown Bourbon's Dan Calloway. We want those swings. When it gets really hot, things expand. Let's the liquid in.

When it gets cold, it contracts. And it's that natural progression of in-out that ages the bourbon so beautifully as the liquid interacts with the wood. As those barrels are aging whiskey for four, five, or six years, some savvy investors have figured out there's money to be made. Whiskey is an interesting asset in the sense that as it ages, it becomes more valuable.

Chris Heller is co-founder of California-based Cordiera investment partners. So explain to me how this works. You go up to a distiller and say, I want to buy those barrels filled with what will eventually become bourbon. So that is exactly right. Heller and his partners buy thousands of newly filled barrels from distillers, pay to store them as the whiskey ages, then sell them to craft bourbon brands. What are your starting costs?

Somewhere in the $600 to $1,000 range is sort of the price of a new, what's called a new fill barrel of whiskey. At the end, what do you sell it for? It can be anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000 by the end. That's a pretty good return on your investment. We really find it an interesting and compelling investment area. Nice way to say it, huh? Whoever makes it, owns it, or ages it,

when bourbon is emptied from a barrel after five or six years, that barrel's life is just beginning, and it's likely to travel the world. It's really interesting that. When the burn barrel is freshly dumped, there's still around two gallons of actually bourbon trapped in that wood. That is just seeped into the wood.

And it's just seeped into the wood. So then a lot of the secondary users actually look forward to put it in their product into the barrel again for four, six, ten, a lot of scotches, 12 years, 18 years. And it can pick up that American bourbon taste. Absolutely, then it pulls out that sweet bourbon. That sweet taste in the wood makes used bourbon barrels very hot commodities.

We really view our role in the industry is moving as many barrels from the original source to the next stopping point as fast as possible. Jess and Ben Lowsky own Midwest barrels. Their Kentucky warehouse is stacked to the rafters with empty barrels. So we're the next stop for the second use of that barrel. So in Kentucky here, we bring in barrels from all the major distilleries and then send them back out. these barrels would be shipped out and then refilled with something else. Correct, yeah.

So the idea is to get these barrels in here and out of here as quickly as possible. So we'll turn over this entire warehouse every two to three weeks. Probably 70 to 80 percent of our business is overseas. It started as a hobby. While Ben was finishing his Ph.D. in Nebraska, he began buying barrels and selling them to local craft breweries. You said that a few barrels were a big order in the beginning. Yeah.

What's a big order today? 10,000? 10,000. Yeah, yeah. India and China and Scotland, Ireland, are by far four biggest markets. The Kentucky Distillers Association says that the state exported more than $300 million worth of used barrels last year, just to Scotland, where they'll be used to age Scotch whiskey for up to 40 years. years. Could you just tick off from me the different spirits that these barrels will hold?

They start with bourbon, Tennessee whiskey, Scotch whiskey, tequila, rum, Pisco, Maine, Peru, Koshasa, Maine, Brazil will use these barrels. Beer. Beer uses them. These barrels, for sure, end up in China. A lot of these barrels end up in Japan. It's everywhere. Beautiful. Now, master blenders like Bardstown's Dan Callaway... This will be cast strength, direct from the barrel, are bringing barrels back to Kentucky to do special finishes for their whiskeys.

So this is the first of its kind. It is an American whiskey finished in Indian whiskey barrels, okay? Indian whiskey is traditionally aged in a bourbon barrel. So the physical barrel has left Kentucky, gone to Bangalore, filled with a barley, and then sent back here. Calloway finished this whiskey in those barrels for 17 months. My God, that's good. Yeah. One of Dan Calloway's newest creations called Cathedral may be his most miraculous yet.

As we sourced wood in the Loire Valley, the Bursay Forest, and this plot, this lot in the forest was selected to repair Notre Dame after the fires. So most of the wood went there. We were fortunate to obtain six barrels made from that wood. And we picked our best stocks of Kentucky bourbon up to 19 years old, filled the barrels. They age for 14 months. You know how wild that is? Yeah. That the beams that restored Notre Dame

come from the same forest as your casks. The same lot. Now that's a story to tell. Absolutely. And a whiskey to taste. Ah. It's nice. When Bardstown put that cathedral bourbon

on sale earlier this year, bottles sold out in near record time. Remember, they only made six barrels full. Now, on the secondary market, Cathedral is listed for as much as $2,000 a bottle. Flamebearers goes beyond scores to bring real stories from women Olympians and Paralympians. Hear from legends like Sue Bird, Castor Semenia, and more about what it takes to be a champion. Tune in to Flamebearers wherever you get your podcasts. There is no shortage of unbelievable stories that start with tequila,

and this is one of them. It involves a celebrity chef, a rock star, and a highway heist that even Hollywood couldn't dream up. Last year, two semi-trucks carrying more than a million dollars' worth of Santo Tequila, a brand founded by Food Network star Guy Fieri and former Van Hale, and frontman, Sammy Hagar, disappeared on its way to the warehouse. If you're wondering how in the world that much tequila could just vanish, we did too. As Sharon Alfonzi first reported in October, it turns out international crime groups

have found new ways to infiltrate the global supply chain online to steal hundreds of millions of dollars of goods. Guy Fieri got a crash course on this sophisticated high-tech theft after a sobering call from the president of his company. Well, when the president of your company calls and says, we have a problem, what's up? And he goes, you're not going to believe this, but we lost two truckloads of Santo Tequila. Lost.

I said, elaborate on lost. He says, well, they disappeared. I said, well, wait, wait, wait, is this a hijacking? I said, are the driver's okay? I said, because all my mind goes to is good fellas, and, you know, that's what I'm thinking is happening. He said, no, no, no, the trucks, they were appropriated, but we don't know where they are. I'm like, it's not a needle in a haystack.

I mean, this is a semi-tractor truck. My mind is swimming in exactly how do you lose, you know, that many thousands of bottles of tequila. 24,000 bottles of tequila, enough alcohol to fuel a lifetime of bad decisions. The tequila started out like every other Santa. batch in Western Mexico, where it was distilled and bottled. From there, it was trucked to the U.S. Mexico border, through customs, and unloaded in Laredo, Texas. The next day, it was moved into two semi-trucks that were supposed to head to the Santo Tequila warehouse in Lansdale, Pennsylvania.

When was the first indication something's not normal here? The product was due on Wednesday to our warehouse in Pennsylvania. And on Thursday morning, the logistics company told us there was a water pump cooler problem with the truck. It's just going to be a slight delay. Dan Butkus is the CEO of Santo Spirits. He told us, like many small businesses, Santo doesn't have their own delivery trucks. So they rely on a logistics company to hire trucking companies to ship their tequila. On Friday, two days after the shipment was supposed to arrive,

the trucking company started sending more excuses about why it was late. Dan Butkus was informed that the truck was near Washington, D.C. with a water pump issue. The logistics company emailed him a video they received of a broken down semi with a note. Looks like the issue is bigger than he thought. Mechanics advised the truck will be fixed Saturday. He says he can deliver Sunday, but I know y'all are closed so he can be there first thing Monday. Okay. So the tequila is late, but you don't think anything's wrong because they're sending emails. Yeah, we don't think anything's wrong. We're a day or two behind delivery.

And meanwhile, they track these with GPS. So someone's checking to make sure the truck is where it says it is. And on GPS, it looks like it's in D.C. where they say it is. Then on Monday, we get an email that the truck is close. GPS says it's within a couple miles of our warehouse in land. Can you let us know when it arrives? The tequila never arrived in Pennsylvania. Here's what happened.

The logistics company that worked for Santo hired a trucking company to move the tequila from Texas to Pennsylvania. But then that trucking company outsource the job to two other trucking companies who then hired drivers. The problem is those second trucking companies were fake with phony letterheads, email addresses, and phone numbers. to appear legitimate. It's a bit of a tractor-trailer-shell game called double-brokering. It happens more than you might expect. Santo's CEO Dan Butkus learned it was all part of an elaborate ruse, set up to buy time and steal the tequila.

So the email that came to you guys was fake, the fixture was fake, the GPS was phony. The GPS signal was spoofed. They call it spoofed or emulated. The thieves had manipulated the GPS to make it look like the tequila was still on its way to Pennsylvania. This is the essence of real tequila. Making matters worse, Guy Fiatty and Sammy Hagar had been heavily promoting a new special tequila ahead of last year's holiday season that took three and a half years to make and all of it was on those two missing trucks.

It's not like we're sitting on huge reserves. So you can't just say, turn it up, we're going to keep making more. That's exactly what we couldn't do. And then you have to go back to the retailer and say, you're not going to believe this. How did this impact the business? Oh, it hurt. It hurt bad. You know, here we are coming right into the fourth quarter. We lose all the tequila.

We can't fill the shelves. We had to lay off players, you know, and that's the hardest thing, knowing how many people are counting on you. So, yeah, it hurt all the way around. Did you think you were being targeted? Well, there's a side of me that still says, yeah, it wasn't a truckload of screwdrivers, you know, it wasn't a truckload of baskets. They were coming across the border. Someone knew what it was, and tequila is a hot commodity. That's why Keith Lewis was called in.

He's a former cop who runs operations for CargoNet, a company that works with law enforcement to solve these kinds of crimes. Lewis says last year, U.S. businesses lost more than $230 million of goods to physical heists and those engineered online. Let's start with the tequila case. How common is something like that? It happens multiple times a day. How does all of this impact consumers and the prices they pay? 100% falls back on the consumer shoulders. 100%. We pay at the pump for this. We pay at the grocery store at the point of sale.

Lewis started investigating and began to piece together how the tequila heist was pulled off. He says the criminals created fake online profiles of trucking companies, bid on jobs they suspected might be valuable, and hired unsuspecting drivers online. Then, instead of sending the drivers to the Santo Warehouse in Pennsylvania, the criminals redirected them to deliver the shipment into their hands. And instead of taking it to the destination that was on the, the bill lading, they told them to take that load to Los Angeles.

And the drivers are not in on this. The driver that picked it up has no idea that he's committing a crime. He thinks he's taking a legitimate load to a legitimate place doing his job. Doing his job. And he's being directed instead by criminals. Correct. Once investigators determined how the tequila was diverted to California, they tried to figure out who did it.

But that was tougher because unlike the country, kind of cargo theft you typically think of, like this, with guys in mass breaking into trucks with bolt cutters, there was no suspect description or fingerprints. Lewis says the tequila heist was orchestrated entirely online. You're saying that these folks don't even need to be in the same country sometimes. No, and we've tracked them to over 40 different countries around the world. And investigators say the tequila heist had all the characteristics of a criminal gang operating out of Armenia, 7,000 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border where the tequila was last seen.

Keith Lewis says that kind of theft where criminals remotely redirect cargo to steal it has spiked 1,200 percent in the last four years. If you think about online dating, for example, you can be anywhere in the world and set up a date with someone. It's the same thing in the supply chain. You can be anywhere in the world. go online and book that load. And we don't do business face-to-face anymore. We don't have the hand-to-hand transactions. We're doing business by PDF file, by rate confirmations.

We booked that load with this individual. We've never met them. And bam, you have a million-dollar load of electronics going down the road, hopefully to the right destination, or maybe it's not. It's become a global threat to our supply chain. Nowhere is that threat higher than California. Last year, California had more goods stolen from trucks, trains, and by cyber criminals than any other states. That's because California's ports and highways make it a favorite target and hiding place for cargo thieves.

To respond, the Los Angeles Police Department created a special unit to tackle all kinds of cargo theft. We were allowed to tag along with them one morning in August. Before dawn, officers swarmed this block in southeast Los Angeles, where they suspected a shipment of rifles stolen from a train were being hidden. They found the rifles, but also stacks of stolen sneakers, piles of power tools, and designer clothes. They've also recovered pallets of protein shakes, energy drinks, and vitamins. Typically, it all ends up in an LAPD way.

until the rifle owner can claim it. It looks like a Costco in here. You've got everything. Yes. This is from a major manufacturer. Alan Hamilton is the chief of detectives at the LAPD. He told us all this had been recovered by the cargo theft unit just a week earlier. So we've got beer here that was stolen.

We've got washing machines. We've got large appliances. You see the sub-zero back there. These are high-end appliances. Some of these are very high-end, high-priced computers. computers. The technology would be turned back around and sold for like 30 to 40 percent of the dollar. The LAPD says the stolen swag is typically sold online or in stores, including this one, to unsuspecting customers. In August, they busted two hardware stores stocked with

stolen goods, $4.5 million worth. What's the value of all the goods that you've recovered over the last year? So just for instance, in 2024, the last year. So just for instance, in 2024, the Los Angeles Police Department cargo theft unit alone. $42.8 million in recovery just in the city of Los Angeles. And it was that unit that cracked open the case of the missing tequila. Detectives tracked down one of the drivers who picked up the tequila in Texas. He moved on to other jobs but told investigators he was directed by what he thought was a legitimate trucking company to leave the shipment at this industrial site in the San Fernando Valley.

That information ultimately led police to this warehouse in southeast L.A. And 11,000 bottles of Santo Tequila. Guy Fietti told us the thieves and that second truck of tequila were never found. It feels like a movie plot. You know, the celebrity chef, the rock star, the small tequila company, you know, it all comes together. The special shipment. Did you think they were going to find it? Gosh, no.

They found it when? Three weeks after, I'll say. So by then, who knows what's happened to it? Who knows what condition it's in, so forth? I'm just thinking, this is all going to go down the drain. But after an inspection of the recovered bottles, Santa was able to put it back in stores and take a shot at a happy ending.

There's a lot of companies that this has happened to, but they don't want to talk about it. Why did you decide to speak about what happened? It's not a thing I want to go and brag about, like, hey, we got ripped off. That's not fun, but if it can happen to us with what I believe we're pretty strong measures and security and awareness and, you know, communication and, you know, the way we do business. And to get ripped off for two full semi-truckloads of tequila in today's age, then everybody's vulnerable. Have a news tip to send to 60 Minutes? Learn how you can send information to our journalists securely

at 60 MinutesOvertime.com. For years, Mescal sat in the shadow of its popular cousin, Tequila, known for its worm and deemed too smoky for a spot on the same shelf as premium spirits, but not anymore. Once banned and later sold in plastic jugs for pennies, the handcrafted spirit has found its way into cocktail bars and Michelin-starred restaurants. As we first told you last year, no other liquor has seen a greater increase in production in the past decade.

Mescal gets its name from the Aztec word for cooked agave, a thorny plant sacred to Mexico for thousands of years. The vast majority of mescal is made in the southern state of Wahaka, where family-owned distilleries dot the landscape. Cecilia Vega went to meet the mescaleros as they labor to quench the world's thirst for mescal. Mescaleros harvest agave year-round, but it's no low-hanging fruit. Pride from the earth, the spikes are removed by machete, revealing the heart, the pina, which looks like a hundred-pound pineapple. Agave takes its sweet time to ripen up to 30 years for some varieties.

It grows in the valleys that run between the Sierra Madre Mountains, here in Oaxaca. The crossroads of indigenous and Spanish colonial cultures, the birthplace of Mescal. And Santiago Matatlan is its cradle. The Hernandez brothers, Armando and Alvaro, are fourth generation Mescalero. from an indigenous Sabotec family. They learn the craft from their father Silverio. Today they run Mal de Amor, one of Matatlan's largest distilleries, or palanches.

We make mescal without hurry, meaning everything in its time. We don't add or do anything to speed up production, but we make it non-stop, 365 days a year, the entire day. Is it different? from the way your father made it? No, it's the same. We conserve all the traditions, everything we were taught,

and everything is done by hand. Agave was first distilled here in the 1600s. Mexicans have been drinking mescal at baptisms, funerals, and every occasion in between ever since. And let's clear this up early. Tequila is a type of mescal, made with blue agave, mostly in the state of Halisco. of Halisco, but most tequila has been mass-produced, made by machines since the 70s.

Artisanal mescal resists machinery. The agave is roasted in underground pits for days, and it's crushed by horse-drawn mill. The mash is fermented in wooden barrels and distilled twice in copper vats. No temperature dials or controls. Bubbles indicate the alcohol content. Who knows more about the process? I think he may know more, but I drink it more. At Malde Amor, they offer Napa-style tours of their agave fields. Mescal is now a half-billion-dollar-a-year industry.

But in the 1980s and 90s, Armando and Alvaro told us production of Mescal could barely support the family. The price of Mescal was very low. It was miserable. What was it? Seven pesos for a liter of Mescal. And we were ten children. Sunday was the only day we could afford a cup of milk and a piece of bread. So we decided to go.

Armando left Mexico first alone, bound for California. Do you remember the day you left? Yes. Yes, it was the 3rd of December, 1992. I was 12 years old. I have children of my own now, and I could never bring myself to let them cross the border alone. It was a sad goodbye.

Very painful to leave the family behind. How did you get there? Like all migrants, with a coyote, smuggled across the border. Alvaro eventually joined him in Los Angeles. They spent a decade working in bars and restaurants when the plot twisted. Artisanal became hip, and Moscow's popularity boomed. Alvaro began to dream about returning to the family business.

I had plans drawn up for the Palenque, and I showed Armando. Alvaro came in with the plan for his Palenke, and he spread it on the bed and said, I'm going to do this. And I told him you're crazy. How are you going to make a living? Armando was skeptical. Until he noticed shots of Mescal going for $10 each.

He says he looked down at the label on a bottle one day, and it was from their hometown. And you finally told your brother, I told you so. So Armando and Alvaro went back home to ramp up the family Palenque. Enter John Rexer and Hilberto Marquez of the mescal brand Illegal, made from 100% espadine, a variety of agave that ripens the fastest. So how far out does the illegal legale go? Is this all illegal?

Yeah. There's about 2,500 plants per acre. There's about five acres out here. There's a lot of espadine, right? Today, Illegal is one of the top-selling mescal brands. It, too, started humbly. Rexer, an expat New Yorker, was in search of a steady supply of mezcal to serve at a bar he owned in Guatemala. I would take a bus up from Guatemala.

It's a 24-hour bus ride. Along the way, you can pull a string in that bus and say, I want to stop here, walk to a village, wait until lights came on somewhere and say, hey, do you know anybody who makes good mescal around here? And invariably, someone would have an uncle, a brother, a cousin. I have an uncle. Tengue and teal, yeah, that's exactly it. Everybody has an uncle. As the name on the bottle suggests,

Rexor's operation wasn't exactly legal. Is it true that you once dressed like a priest to have to get this across a border? Listen, I went through 12 years of Catholic school. Me too. I knew how to play the role. It was his friend, Hilberto Marquez, who introduced him to the Hernandez brothers.

And we rolled down here, and it was very, very, very tiny, and they were making very, very, very, small amounts. And he asks me, do you have more of this mescal? And we said, yes. We have 10,000 liters. And it took us like two years to make.

And John says to us, I want it all. A sidebar, and this may go without saying, that Rexer has swigged his fair share of mescal. Excuse me. Do you want to water? Yeah, no, take a break. You're good. Just like, do I want a water?

You know, there's an expression, the best mescal is the one in front of you. It's not entirely true. You don't want to cover it in smoke. You want to taste the agave. A lot of people say they don't like mescal because of the smoke. Obviously, you're in a smoky environment, right? When you dig up the pit oven, there's smoke everywhere. So there's a lot of early mescales that came into the states that are heavy smoked.

Has mescal gotten a bad rap on that front? I think in the early days it did. But people began to discover, no, the agaves have particular unique flavors. Rexer asked brothers, Armando and Alvaro, to go into business. And he made a promise. If they could produce the mescal, he'd sell it around the world. They'd been burned by false promises before, so they weighed his offer in their native language.

You spoke in Zapotech so he wouldn't understand. I said to Alvaro, in Zapotech, do you believe him? And he said, I don't know. But we figured, let's see. I said, listen, I'll pay you up front so that we can get. started. Two days later, we had the deposit in our account for all 10,000 liters. He said, each month, I'll keep making deposits.

So we made more, 500 liters, 1,000, 2,000, and it grew like that. Now their partnership produces 3,000 bottles of mescal a day, almost all of them for export. And every bottle is certified by the Mexican government, stamped with a hologram to mark denomination of origin, like champagne or cognac. We'd heard there are rules about how to drink this artisanal mescal. The good stuff isn't for shots or diluting in cocktails. It's for sipping. So we asked Marquez, the former bartender who now promotes illegal.

Favorite way to drink it? Spicy margarita. Oh, wait a second. I thought you weren't supposed to drink mescal in a margarita. You do want to enjoy mescal neat, but there's nothing wrong with having it in a cocktail. especially if we're trying to get folks to try it for the first time. It's an introduction to Mesca. Marquez poured us a Hoven, the colorless mescal you'll find in most bottles.

This is 100% espadine. So Hoven means young. Hoven means young, unaged. Salus. This one tastes spicy to me. So smoke is not the first thing that you taste. It's definitely there, but I would not call this smoky. Yes.

Aging mescal is a Mexican tradition. Illegal does it in American oak, the same way bourbon is made. So this is the añejo, and this is aged 15 months. Color's definitely darker. Yep. Wow, so good. How would you drink this one? Absolutely neat, 100%.

Has anyone ever said to you, hey, what's a gringo like you doing? In a place like this. In a place like this. Oaxaca, Oaxaca. Yes. I've gotten pushed back over the years. You're a foreigner. But I'm someone who fell in love with the rhythm and the pace of Oaxaca and fell in love with Meskow.

He's no longer the only foreigner in this partnership. Bucardi, the largest privately held global spirits company, acquired illegal last year in a deal worth a reported $100 million. When we started to grow the brand, one of the questions I asked myself was, how do you fall in love with something and then not to show? the thing you fell in love with by making it grow. Can you do that with an international conglomerate like Bacardi? I think it's a great question because it's not just the beautiful liquor, but it's certain things that we're trying to preserve and believe in.

This is a family business. We have to respect the artisanal production. We can never let this become industrial. What does the deal with Bacardi mean for you? What's going to change is many people's lives in this community. It's a benefit for the whole community. community. The Palenque now employs 100 people from Matatlan and beyond, including their 87-year-old father, the Mescalero emeritus. Armando and Alvaro translated from Sapotech to Spanish. We asked what

Senor Hernandez thought of his son's mescal. Does it live up to the family name? That's why I drink it. If not, I wouldn't drink it. The Hernandez brothers are expanding the family Palenque. Construction is already underway. So if there's the American dream, is this the Mexican dream? It's the Mexican dream. It's something we never imagined. We are sad to report Silvio Hernandez,

patriarch of the Hernandez family, died in March. His sons say his legacy will live on in every day. drop of their mescal. I'm Bill Whitaker. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back next week with an all-new edition of 60 Minutes. Happy New Year.