Colonche

At a glance

Colonche is the fermented juice of the red prickly pear, the fruit of the nopal cactus, turned into a tart, fruity, lightly fizzy drink of an almost startling deep red. It is one of the oldest drinks in Mexico, made in the high semi-desert of the north-central plateau long before the Spanish arrived, and made there still, in much the same way. It is barely-to-mildly alcoholic, sitting at roughly 3 to 7% alcohol by volume (abbreviated ABV, the standard measure of how much alcohol a drink contains), which puts a fully fermented colonche in beer territory and a fresh, young one closer to a soft drink.

A first clarification, because the name confuses English speakers: the tuna that colonche is made from is not the fish. Tuna is the Spanish word for the fruit of the Opuntia, the flat-padded cactus that Mexicans call nopal (the pads themselves, the nopales, are eaten as a vegetable). The fruit grows along the rim of the pad, is covered in fine spines, and ranges from green to yellow to a vivid red-purple depending on the species. Colonche is made from the red kind, the tuna cardona, the fruit of Opuntia streptacantha and its close relatives.

Like pulque and tepache, colonche is a fermented beverage and not a distilled spirit, and it sits slightly outside a strict canon of distilled Mexican spirits. It earns its place here for the same reason those two do: the living tradition of Mexican fermentation is the soil the distilled spirits grew out of, and colonche is one of its oldest surviving fruit ferments. It carries no Denomination of Origin or other protected legal status; it is a folk drink, seasonal and largely homemade, with no governing standard.

A pre-Hispanic drink with two old names

Colonche is genuinely ancient. The peoples of the arid central plateau were fermenting prickly-pear juice long before the conquest, and the drink carries names from that deep past. The Nahuatl name is nochoctli, built from nochtli (prickly pear) and octli (the word for fermented agave sap, the drink we now call pulque): literally "prickly-pear wine," a name that places colonche in the same conceptual family as pulque. The common name colonche is also of indigenous origin. The folk name sangre de tuna, "prickly-pear blood," is a plain description of the color, which is the single most striking thing about the drink.

That brilliant red is not added. It comes straight from the fruit, from a class of natural pigments called betalains (the same family of red-violet pigments that makes beets and amaranth their colors). The tuna cardona is loaded with them, and they survive the fermentation, so the finished colonche is the deep magenta-red of the juice it was made from. No other common Mexican ferment looks anything like it.

How colonche is made

The method has changed remarkably little over the centuries, and at its core it is simple. The ripe red tunas are gathered by hand from the wild or semi-wild cactus stands of the high desert, a thorny job done with care because the fruit's fine spines lodge in the skin. The spines are brushed or singed off, the tough skin is removed, and the soft, seed-filled flesh is crushed and pressed to extract the deep red juice.

What happens next varies by tradition, and the sources genuinely differ. In some places the juice is briefly boiled before fermenting, which concentrates the sugars and gives a sweeter, more syrupy result; in others it is fermented raw, straight from the press. The juice is then left in earthenware pots, or today often in food-grade plastic, and allowed to ferment for anywhere from one to seven days. The fermentation is spontaneous: no commercial yeast is added, because the prickly-pear fruit arrives already carrying its own population of wild yeasts and bacteria, which start the fermentation on their own. A short ferment of a day or two yields a sweeter, softer, barely-alcoholic drink; a full week gives a drier, tarter, stronger colonche. As with most live ferments there is no fixed endpoint, only a window, and reading that window by taste is most of the maker's skill.

The microbiology, briefly

Colonche works the way the other spontaneous Mexican ferments do: the raw material arrives pre-seeded with the microbes that will transform it. Studies of cactus-fruit ferments find a mixed community of wild yeasts (chiefly Saccharomyces and related genera), which convert the fruit's abundant sugars into alcohol, working alongside lactic acid bacteria, the same broad family that sours yogurt, sauerkraut, and kombucha and that here drives colonche's clean fruity tartness. The lactic acid bacteria also push the acidity up far enough to hold most spoilage organisms in check during the short ferment.

Because the process is wild and seasonal, the exact mix shifts from batch to batch and place to place, and the finished drink is never quite identical twice. As with every live ferment, the clock keeps running after the drink is "done": left too long, acetic-acid bacteria take over and turn the alcohol toward vinegar, which is one reason colonche is drunk young and local rather than aged or shipped.

A drink of the harvest

The defining fact about colonche is that it is strictly seasonal. The red tunas ripen only in the back half of the year, roughly July through October, and colonche can only be made while the fruit is on the cactus. There is no year-round colonche the way there is year-round beer; when the harvest ends, so does the drink, until the cactus fruits again. That seasonality is the main reason colonche never industrialized: you cannot run a factory on a crop that exists for three or four months and yields a drink too alive to keep. It has stayed artisanal, regional, and tied to the rhythm of the desert harvest.

Its homeland is the high semi-desert of north-central Mexico, the altiplano where the tuna cardona cactus blankets the landscape: above all Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí, along with Aguascalientes and parts of Querétaro and Guanajuato. In those states colonche is a drink of the tuna season, sold at roadside stands and in town markets during the harvest months, an expression of a landscape where the prickly pear is not a curiosity but a staple, feeding people, livestock, and, for these few months, a fermenting pot.

Colonche has seen a small revival in the last decade or so, the same biocultural-conservation and ancestral-cuisine current that has lifted pulque. A handful of artisanal producers have begun bottling limited quantities, and the drink has even reached a few venues abroad: a café in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles has been credited with introducing colonche to a United States audience that had never heard of it. Medium confidenceMedium confidence: most claims are backed by reputable secondary sources, but some details rely on inference or have not yet been verified against primary sources.The drink is sometimes described in popular coverage as having "almost gone extinct," which overstates the case for a beverage still made every season across several Mexican states; what is fair to say is that it remains little-known outside its home region and fragile as a commercial product. Its fragility, seasonality, and lack of any standard recipe make it at once a strong candidate for conservation and a difficult one to scale.

Sensory profile

The first thing about colonche is the color: a deep, saturated magenta-red, the most vivid of any common Mexican ferment, often a little cloudy with fine fruit solids. The aroma is fresh and fruity, the sweet-tart smell of ripe prickly pear, which has a melon-like, faintly floral, faintly vegetal character of its own. The taste follows: ripe prickly-pear fruit up front, a clean fruity tartness behind it (lactic, in the same broad family of sourness as a mild kombucha), and a light natural prickle of fizz rather than the hard carbonation of a soda. A fresh, young colonche is sweeter and rounder, the fruit dominating and the alcohol barely there; a fully fermented one is drier and tarter, with a little more warmth and a cleaner, more wine-like edge. The body is light and the finish is short and fruity, drying as the ferment ages. Across the range it tastes unmistakably of the fruit it is made from, a drinkable distillation of the prickly pear's own sweet-tart character, only without any distillation at all.

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