Traditional to Mexico, Tepache Finds Its Way Northward

On the beverage menu at Loreto, a sceney Mexican seafood restaurant in LA’s Frogtown neighborhood, Tepache Sazón is available by the bottle. The traditional Mexican fermented beverage takes up space on the menu next to their house Michelada, $18 cocktails, and Mexican wine from Valle de Guadalupe. It stands out on the menu for clocking in at 7 percent ABV as the only non-beer, non-cider, and non-wine option. Yet when I visited last July, not even our server was able to give me an accurate description of it:“It’s like a kombucha,” he said casually.

Of course, we ordered it. It poured a lightly cloudy amber yellow, and the thick, brown-glass bottle felt luxurious in my hand. It had bubbles and—to the surprise of my extremely skeptical wife, raised less than an hour from where it was produced in San Pancho, Nayarit—it was stunningly refreshing, with a hyper-tropical, intense pineapple flavor. Most importantly, it was not too sweet. It tasted just like the tepache she’d grown up drinking around Jalisco, but made slightly boozy.

And no, it did not taste like kombucha.

“The most important part of a tepache is the quality of the fruit,” says Sebastian Medina, the head of operations and senior tepachero of the emerging brand. Medina is originally from Mexico City, but later moved to San Pancho, where he helped build the tepachería.

His statement runs counter to the waste-nothing narrative that many American and European bartenders have been trying to push about tepache, adapting it as a tasty way to reduce a bar’s waste by using a pineapple’s woody core and discarded peels to make it. Anyone who’s tried making tepache from whole fruit versus just peels and core knows the difference in the fuller texture, flavor, and aroma in the tepache when the whole fruit has been used.

Tepache’s origins date to before the 1500s in central Mexico. The root word is from Nahuatl (Mexico’s Aztec language), meaning “drink made from corn,” since that was what tepache was originally fermented from, mostly for ritualistic practices. Pineapple is native to the Americas. The earliest archeological records for the fruit in Mexico go back to 200 BCE–700 AD. It’s believed that tepache transitioned from corn to pineapple (and other tropical fruits like guavas and tamarind) in the latter half of that period. The fruits that are used to make tepache change according to the region to this day.

“Nayarit is known around Mexico for having the sweetest pineapples. And whenever there’s a surplus, buyers in other states fight to be able to buy them.”—Sebastian Medina

“Nayarit is known around Mexico for having the sweetest pineapples. And whenever there’s a surplus, buyers in other states fight to be able to buy them,” Medina says. The region’s pineapple variety is known as Pina Miel MD2. The ones used by Tepache Sazón are stubbier, about half the size of the average pineapple in supermarkets in the U.S. Still, they have a robust tropical pineapple flavor—nearly leaning into coconut flavor territory. These pineapples take 18 months to ripen. When they’re ready to harvest, the farmers say, “la piña esta sazona.” This local term to identify fully ripened, ready-to-eat pineapples inspired the tepache brand’s name.

Tepache Sazón has its own pineapple fields, which produce 85 percent of the pineapples that Sazón uses. The rest are sourced from nearby farms. (The brand plans to eventually grow all of its own pineapples.) Medina ferments their tepache for 12 to 15 days, including a secondary fermentation with added dosage (pineapple juice, piloncillo, and canela) and additional yeast to produce effervescence. Sazón’s recipe came from a recipe trade that its half-Australian and half-Mexican founder and maestro tepachero, Rio Chenery, made with a Jalisco resident named Margarito Alvarez, who is originally from Michoacán, but at the time was working as a caretaker at Chenery’s La Estancia distillery making raicilla (Jalisco’s version of mezcal). Alvarez wanted to learn how to make raicilla, since Chenery owned a popular brand.

Sazón started building its tepachería in 2021, and its tepache is now available in about 20 states and Puerto Rico. Unlike Mexico’s tequila and mezcal market, which primarily exports the best products to the United States, Canada, and Europe, Tepache Sazón aims to distribute the tepache to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico City, and other big cities in Mexico.

Back in Frogtown, Sazón paired well with Loreto’s high-acid, spicy seafood. But even Medina agrees that the best way, and his favorite way, of enjoying his fine-tuned tepache is with a plate of al pastor tacos—pineapple on pineapple carnage. “Tacos with tepache is extremely nostalgic for me, every single time.”

With the American commodification of a Mexican staple like tepache, there’s also the potential to alienate the working class who kept the beverage popular over the course of generations.

With the American commodification of a Mexican staple like tepache, there’s also the potential to alienate the working class who kept the beverage popular over the course of generations. Unintentional or not, history has shown that this can happen, as with the case of mezcal in Oaxaca, where mezcal’s booming global popularity means many Oaxacan natives are no longer able to afford it. However, a fermented beverage like tepache is different, because its core ingredients can be easily obtained and fermented by anyone willing to experiment.

Off Rosecrans Avenue in Compton, California, south of downtown Los Angeles, 60-year-old Gustavo “Don Tavo” Diaz has been selling tepache from his home full of banana blossoms for the last two years. He sets up shop on his front porch under the canopy of a lush tree in his yard, and opens his front gate to customers thirsty for traditional Mexican fermented beverages. He’s been selling tejuinos (a tepache-like beverage made from fermented masa with fresh lime juice and rock salt) for the last decade after working as a landscaper in Los Angeles for 34 years.

“I was 6 years old when I first tasted tepache. A woman named Doña Vacilia used to sell it in my hometown. She served it in clay mugs and added a pinch of baking soda to make it lightly effervescent,” Diaz says. Adding baking soda to tepache is a dying style, but Diaz says that he does get customers who come in and demand it. “My customers from Nayarit especially like it with baking soda.” His tepache is much more rustic and homier in flavor and texture. It tastes sweeter because it does not go through a secondary fermentation and is unfiltered.

Diaz added tepache to his menu because his customers kept requesting it. His patrons are mostly immigrants from Central America and Mexico, like himself. He shares that recently, though, his beverages have become popular with some of his other neighbors, including members of the Black community, many of whom weren’t familiar with tepache until Diaz offered them samples. On my last visit, some LA County sheriff’s deputies stopped for a drink of his tepache as well.

Don Tavo offers an oversized cup filled with fresh tepache and ice for only a few dollars. He also offers traditional Mexican street snacks like tostilocos (tortilla chips doused with lime juice, peanuts, chamoy, and pickled pig skin), nachos, and fresas con crema. His tepache recipe can be categorized as Jalisco-style, since he learned the technique from a tejuinero in Ahualulco de Mercado, Jalisco, where he was raised. He says he paid the tejuinero known as “El Temblorín” $5,000 pesos (about $300 US) for it. And now other people from his hometown who have stopped by tell him that his version is better than his mentor’s original.

After more than a decade of advocacy by community leaders, LA County decriminalized informal workers like [Gustavo] Diaz.

Diaz is an active participant in LA’s informal economy, fueled by mostly cash-only cottage vendors and street vendors, and open every day from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. After more than a decade of advocacy by community leaders, LA County decriminalized informal workers like Diaz. He’s one of tens of thousands across LA County. Diaz is especially proud that his son, Gustavo Jr., also appreciates his tepache and tejuino craft and will keep his legacy going by opening a “Don Tavo” food truck offering fresh tepache and tejuino, which will debut during the hotter months later this year.

Bryant Joel Orozco is a Mexican American bartender, with parents from Nayarit and Sonora, who’s been preaching the fermented gospel of tepache since 2016. He first started offering it in cocktails for regulars at Roxanne’s in north Long Beach. “That was around the year when there was a growing interest with tepache experimentation with other bartenders here,” he says.

He’s not wrong. The first craft tepache bottled on the West Coast was “Reverend” Nat West’s Padre Nat’s Tepache in Portland, Oregon, in 2014. But Orozco was more interested in the culture behind tepache rather than developing a bottle-stable formula for it to sell. This led Orozco to create a video series titled “Last Call: Mexico,” which is still in development, leading him to become one of the country’s foremost experts on traditional fermented beverages.

In the last year, he was a co-founder of LA’s no-alcohol pop-up bar, Bar Nuda, and utilized tepache’s fermented full flavor as an ingredient in his cocktails. “It’s all about getting people excited for Mexico’s fermented beverages like tejuino, colonche [an intensely red drink made from fermenting the fruit of nopal cactus], and tepache,” Orozco says. He always offers it as a sample to his customers so they can try it on its own. “Many have never heard of these beverages, so putting them in cocktails makes it approachable and accessible to people who may not be acquainted with the funkier prominent flavors in these fermented drinks.”

Orozco’s current tepache recipe is mellow and more “agua fresca–like,” he says. It leans more on a crushable character, rather than pungency. The recipe is inspired by the Mexico City style (made with multiple fruits versus just pineapples) but is an amalgamation of research from the last few years. It’s noncarbonated, and is made by co-fermenting pineapple with strawberries, guavas, apples, and tamarind. He starts by making a cinnamon tea. He then lets the tea cool, and adds piloncillo and the sliced fruit to start fermenting. At Maizano restaurant in Costa Mesa (where he’s the bar lead and head-ing the bar’s fermentation program)—inside Mercado González, a Mexican culinary mercado that’s the first of its kind in the country—he offers his latest tepache served over ice.

Orozco is aware of the potential positives and negatives that can come from bottling and selling tepache. “On one hand, it’s great that Americans are being exposed to tepache, because it shows the breadth of Mexican beverages beyond tequila, mezcal, and beer, especially for nerds like us who like to go down the rabbit hole.”

On the other hand, Orozco also sees potential pitfalls. “I’m aware that tepache can be misrepresented as a ‘new kombucha,’ but that’s detrimental because it’s two completely different cultures.” He’s also weary of tepache drawing attention from the health and wellness crowd, some of whom are looking to capitalize on the trend.“ Some beverages should just be respected in the local sense. Instead of buying a spiced pineapple soda that you can crack open, why not just find and support your local tepachero?

“Just don’t call tepache exotic,” Orozco says. “Maybe it’s just new to you.”