Coyote

At a glance

Coyote is a traditional sotol made in Aldama, a town just northeast of the city of Chihuahua, at the Ruelas family distillery, one of the oldest surviving sotol-making operations in the state. The spirit is the work of Maestro Sotolero Gerardo Ruelas, a hereditary sotol-maker whose family has worked the trade across several generations. A "maestro sotolero" is simply the lead distiller of a sotol house, the sotol equivalent of a maestro mezcalero.

Coyote is one of four distinct brands that all come out of the same Ruelas production stable in Aldama. The others are Oro de Coyame, Onó, and La Higuera. They share a maker and a method, but each is marketed as its own brand, often built around a different species of the source plant. Understanding that one family stands behind all four is the single most useful fact for reading this corner of the sotol shelf.

Sotol, and what plant it comes from

Sotol is not an agave spirit. It is distilled from the heart of the Dasylirion genus, the desert-spoon plant, a separate botanical lineage from agave that grows wild on the dry, rocky slopes of the Chihuahuan Desert. The plant takes on the order of twelve to fifteen years or more to reach harvest size and is propagated almost entirely by seed, so the plants Coyote uses are wild-gathered rather than farmed.

Coyote is built specifically on Dasylirion leiophyllum, one of the common Chihuahua desert-spoon species and, among sotol-makers, the one often described as the driest and most peppery of the group. (This site does not yet have a dedicated page for leiophyllum; its sibling brands lean on other species in the same genus, such as Dasylirion wheeleri and Dasylirion cedrosanum.) The plants are reported to be harvested at roughly twelve to fifteen years of age.

How Coyote is made

The Coyote method is the traditional artesanal Chihuahua process, run small. After the leaves are stripped, the cooked hearts (the piñasPiña: the trimmed heart of the plant, named for its pineapple-like shape once the leaves are cut away. With agave it is the bulb; with sotol it is the comparable cooked core.) are roasted in a conical stone oven fired with mesquite wood, the wood smoke being part of what gives Chihuahua sotol its gentle savory character. The roasted hearts are then stone-crushed, fermented in oak vats on well water, and twice distilled in copper pot stills.

The result is bottled as a single unaged (blanco) expression, typically at a high traditional strength of around 50% ABVABV: alcohol by volume, the percentage of the liquid that is pure alcohol. A 50% ABV spirit is 100 proof.. There is no cut down to a round, low number and no blending across batches to manufacture a fixed house flavor; the spirit is presented at close to the strength it comes off the still.

Where Coyote sits

Coyote belongs to the traditional, single-species, copper-distilled half of the Chihuahua sotol landscape, the same world as the Jacquez family's Sotol Por Siempre and the Coyame-region single-maker bottlings of Flor del Desierto, and at the opposite end from the larger, broadly distributed Hacienda de Chihuahua operation. Within its own immediate family it is best read alongside its three stablemates: where Oro de Coyame is the high-volume label, Onó the cocktail-focused cedrosanum bottling, and La Higuera the species-by-species showcase, Coyote is the house's leiophyllum expression and one of its oldest names.

See also