Chad Eats Worm At Bottom of Mezcal Bottle [VIDEO]

Chad Middleton is many things at 600 ESPN El Paso: producer, co-host, call screener, SportsCenter Update guy, High School Football reporter, and blogger. He can now add another title to his resume....worm eater! That's right, folks. Chad vowed to eat the worm found at the bottom of the Gusano de Oro Mezcal bottle. And his wife, Rochelle was kind enough to capture it on video for us.

I did a little research on Mezcal and here's what I found on mexpanol.com.

Just as Cognac is a special type of brandy produced from specific grapes grown in a select region of France not all brandy has the distinction of being Cognac. In like manner, all liquors distilled from any agave plant are "mezcal", but only those made from the blue agave are branded as Tequila, all the others are mezcal.

The most famous mezcal is distilled from a variety of agave grown in the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, and the finest comes from the wild agave known as "papalomé" that it is so potent that two shots can really knock you down!

As for the worm, the website claims it all started 70 years ago thanks to Jacobo Lozano Paez, who moved to Mexico City and started and alcohol beverage company.

In 1950, Paez, discovered in tasting, that the maguey (agave) worms gave the mezcal a different flavor, since when the plant was cut for cooking a lot of these creatures remained in the heart during production (a bad choice of plagued magueys).

This is how he got the idea to give his product a distinctive marketing touch; adding a worm to the beverage and including with the bottle a small sack with salt, seasoned with the same larva, dehydrated and ground. Ultimately these ingredients determined the identification of the mezcals "Gusano de Oro" and "Gusano Rojo.

The video also illustrated that Chad had already polished off the 250 ml of Mezcal that listener Augustine was kind enough to deliver last week. As of early this morning, Chad told me he was feeling OK after his little experiment. The worm apparently was so pickled in Mezcal that it killed any disgusting aftertaste he might have encountered. Congratulations, Chad!