Acocote

The acocote is a long, slender, hollowed-out bottle gourd (the dried fruit of Lagenaria siceraria) used by the tlachiquero, the pulque tapper, to draw aguamiel ("honey water") from a tapped maguey. The vessel is typically a meter or more in length, with both ends opened: one end is placed into the cajete (the scraped cavity in the heart of the maguey), and the tlachiquero applies lung suction at the other end to draw the sweet sap up the gourd, then transfers it to a collecting jar or skin. A skilled tlachiquero will visit a hundred or more tapped magueys twice a day in this way, working an entire morning and an entire evening through the plant's productive months.

The acocote is the most distinctive working tool in the pulque-production chain and is iconographically inseparable from the tlachiquero figure in 19th-century Mexican lithography and 20th-century muralism. Functionally it is unimprovable: a meter-long natural straw is a near-perfect tool for the specific extraction problem the maguey heart presents, and modern attempts to replace it with rubber, plastic, or stainless tubing have not displaced the gourd in working pulque haciendas. The aguamiel drawn through the acocote is then carried to the tinacal, the fermenting room, where wild yeast and Zymomonas bacteria convert it to pulque within hours. The full pulque-production arc, from tapping through fermentation, sits in the history chapter's pulque sections.