Kikapoo

At a glance

Kikapoo is a sotol made by Destiladora la Tradición la Familia, a house based in General Cepeda, in the desert state of Coahuila. Sotol is the regional spirit of the Chihuahuan Desert, distilled from Dasylirion, the slow-growing rosette plant locally called sotol or "desert spoon," and not from agave. Kikapoo's defining claim is that every plant is wild-harvested: gathered from the open desert rather than cultivated on a plantation, from plants that take roughly twenty years to mature before they can be cut.

The same house is best known for an award-winning sotol called Excéntrico, which took a gold medal at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition in 2019; Kikapoo is its more affordable, wild-harvested stablemate. The name refers to the Kikapú people (Kickapoo in English), an indigenous nation of the United States Great Lakes whose southern community settled in northern Mexico in the nineteenth century and remains there today. The brand uses the name as a tribute to that desert heritage; the people themselves are a living community, not a marketing motif, and this site notes the reference rather than retelling their story for them.

Wild harvest, and what it costs

The phrase "wild-harvested" carries real weight in sotol. Cultivated desert spoon can be planted, managed, and cut on a schedule; wild plants cannot. A wild Dasylirion may grow for two decades in the open Chihuahuan Desert before it holds enough sugar to distil, and once cut it is gone. Harvesting from the wild therefore ties the spirit's supply directly to the health of the desert, which is why wild-harvested desert spirits raise the same sustainability questions that wild agave does for mezcal. Kikapoo is bottled as an unaged plata (silver, meaning clear and unrested) at 45% ABV, and is sold as certified organic under the United States Department of Agriculture programme.

How it is made

In broad outline Kikapoo follows the traditional method of the sotol country. The desert-spoon hearts, the cabezas (heads, the sotol equivalent of the agave piñaPiña: the cooked heart of an agave or sotol plant. With the spiky leaves trimmed away, the rounded core that remains resembles a pineapple, which is what piña means in Spanish; it is roasted to convert its starches into fermentable sugars.), are roasted, fermented, and distilled to produce a clear spirit that carries the rustic, earthy, herbaceous character typical of the region: cooked-vegetable and green-herb notes over a peppery base. Sotol is governed by the standard NOM-159-SCFI-2004A regulatory-standard NOM is a federal Mexican product norm. Unlike facility NOMs (4-digit identifiers of specific distilleries), a standard NOM defines the rules for an entire category of product: which raw materials are permitted, where the product may be made, how it must be processed, and how the bottle must be labeled. Standard NOMs are written as "NOM-XXX-SCFI-YYYY" where XXX is the standard number and YYYY is the year. NOM-159-SCFI-2004 (Sotol). The official Mexican standard for sotol production. Names only two legally permitted species (Dasylirion cedrosanum and D. duranguensis), limits production to Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango, and permits up to 49% non-Dasylirion sugar (analogous to tequila mixto). Notably excludes D. wheeleri, which is the most-distributed sotol plant in the Chihuahuan Desert; a regulatory gap. and may be produced in Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango.

Where Kikapoo sits

Kikapoo occupies the accessible, wild-harvested end of the sotol shelf, a notch below its own house's flagship Excéntrico in price and above the entry-level blended sotols. It is most usefully read against the Chihuahua wild-sotol houses such as Flor del Desierto and the producer-credited approach of Sotol Clande: all of them lean on wild desert spoon, and comparing them shows how much a sotol's character depends on where in the desert the plant grew and how long it stood there before it was cut.

See also