Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston’s Dos Hombres Mezcal is delicious in a dressing, in a margarita, and in a dozen other cocktails — but don’t you dare drink it all at once.
“It’s actually sacrilegious to take mezcal,” Paul tells PEOPLE. “Taking an injection of something is like taking a very bad drug – you’re just trying to get it over with as quickly as possible. But mezcal is so labor-intensive, it’s a real work of art, so down in Mexico, say you kiss a ghost, which I like. You just kiss spirit and you enjoy it.”
In a Zoom video call with PEOPLE, Breaking Bad Costars say they understand why some might consider the drink — tequila is popular in drink form, after all. But while mezcal has a similar profile to tequila, they are very different spirits, they insist.
“Try Dos Hombres instead of tequila and you’ll notice a few differences,” says Cranston. “It’s like a little kick. It’s like tequila’s big brother.”
Paul adds, “We always say it’s tequila’s older, more sophisticated, cooler cousin.”
Dos Hombres Mezcal.
Dos Hombres
Dos Hombres celebrated five years on the market on July 9. Here, Paul and Cranston talk about the milestone, their favorite ways to drink, and what’s next.
Congratulations on five years. How does it feel?
Aaron Paul: It’s a big deal for us. We are very proud to say that Bryan and I have funded this company from the start. That was our idea. It took us a little more than two and a half years from the idea to the market launch. We had to travel to Oaxaca, find the perfect mezcal and also learn how to run a company.
Bryan Cranston: We agreed to go to Oaxaca and see if we could find our own, not something that already existed that we’d just put our names on and say, “Hey, send us a paycheck.” It was something we wanted to do organically. We are both very hard workers. We’re from a blue-collar family, so this is what we know.
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Gregorio Velasco and Bryan Cranston.
Dos Hombres
Have you always loved mezcal?
AP: I am so proud to say that I reintroduced Bryan to the world of mezcal. Bryan tried mezcal when he was in high school, and it was terrible mezcal. And for five decades or so, he never touched it again. So it was very important to us that this spirit, this mezcal that we brought out into the world, that people could drink it pure, in its pure, raw form as it was always meant to be drunk.
Bryan and I have different palates. I come from bourbon, whiskey, whiskey. Bryan likes things that are incredibly fruity and doesn’t like the taste of…
B.C: [Laughs] Look at yourself!
AP: No, no, just kidding. just kidding But we had to find something that meets in the middle. He needed something incredibly smooth, but I needed something that gave me that warmth. We tasted more than 90 different mezcals all over beautiful Oaxaca and finally we were blessed to meet Gregorio Velasco — now our third generation mezcalero, he started learning the ropes when he was eight years old — and we were introduced to his craft .
BC: We found both – we found smooth and warm. American audiences who are not used to mezcal are a bit suspicious of it. It’s mysterious, but is it too smoky? Ours is not. It’s very tempting. You sip this and you can taste some of the staple fruits from the small hilly area of San Luis del Rio where they have guava, mango, bananas, strawberries and a Mexican fruit called sapote. So you could really taste some of the fruit that is cross-pollinated by bees and bats in this very vegetative region.
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What are some of the differences between tequila and mezcal besides taste?
BC: There are about 35 different varieties of agave plants that you can turn into mezcal. Tequila is made only from the blue agave plant. We smoke the mezcal in an earthen pit while they steam the tequila for a few hours, and their distillation process goes into these big silos. So they mass-produce tequila, whereas you can’t really mass-produce mezcal that’s artisanal.
Where we do it in Mexico, in what’s called a palenque, which is the term for the processing plant where we ferment the agave and distill it, there’s no electricity, no running water. That’s because we do it the old-fashioned way like they did it hundreds of years ago.
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AP: There are only two ingredients in our mezcal. It is smoked agave and mountain spring water. It is forbidden to have any additives. Honestly, I think that’s the main, main difference between mezcal and tequila. By law, you can add quite a few things to tequila.
BC: It’s only 70 calories per ounce. It’s a very clean cocktail. You can sip this with a soda or something, and you have 70 calories all night long.
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Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston.
Dos Hombres
What is your drinking style?
AP: It really depends on the occasion. I think if I’m at home, I like it neat or big. But if I have some friends over, I like to make cocktails, black cocktails, or old fashioned or just a classic margarita. So I was introduced to it 18, 19 years ago, it was a spiced mezcal margarita, and I couldn’t tell the spirit, but I was like, “This is amazing. What is this?” And then I fell in love.
BC: The slight smokiness of Dos Hombres works so well in a michelada. It goes so well with that tomato-based spiciness and then the beer. I had another one in Austin, Texas the other day, and I’m so happy with it.
But I’ll tell you something, if you try Dos Hombres instead of vodka in a Bloody Mary or whatever Bloody Maria is, you’ll never go back to vodka.
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Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston at the bar.
Dos Hombres
You both look like you’re having a lot of fun bartending events and promoting the product. Is that correct?
AP: Well, somebody has to do it. Someone has to do it. [Laughs] Look, yeah, we’re having a lot of fun. But it’s a lot of work. We pound the pavement. We have been working on it for a long time and we know what needs to be done to become successful. And complete transparency, we just poured money into this company. It’s true. But we are growing so fast.
We just celebrated five years on the market and just dethroned the fourth place. So we’re now mezcal number four out there, and we’re swinging for that number one. And I truly believe we will get there.
BC: It’s the kind of competitive spirit that we both have, but it’s not in a way that disparages or belittles any other company. Those companies we compete with are good and we want them to be good, so we have to be at our best to be able to beat them.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education