MONTERREY, NL—Agua frescas, iced fruit juices sweetened with water common throughout Mexico, nearly always come in the same container. It is a sort of giant Huggy barrel made of rigid, clear plastic with a colorful lid on top. Some agua fresca vendors sell their drinks from buckets, pails, or pitchers, but across Mexico the vitrolero reigns supreme. As popular as these sweet refreshments are, their containers seem just as emblematic of everyday Mexican drinking. Today, you can even buy miniature versions of vitroleros for individual consumption. It is humbly the most iconic container in Mexico.
Agua fresca is a daily drink for many Mexicans. Liters of the colorful and fruity drinks are consumed in styrofoam or plastic cups with meals or during walks on hot days. The drinks come in every flavor. Yes, every flavor. If there is a fruit in Mexico, an agua fresca has been made out of it. The most common flavors are jamaica, made with hibiscus, horchata, made with rice, and chia with lime. Many regions, however, use local and seasonal fruits to make these drinks. In semi-arid regions, cactus fruit enter the picture. In tropical regions, wild cherries and other fruits do. Sometimes, these flavors are mixed into fruit punches.
Accordingly, agua fresca is one of the most diverse drinks in Mexico showcasing the many flavors of the country. But consistently, for some reason, the drink is ladled out of its ice bath in a plastic barrel–the ubiquitous vitrolero.
Not everyone in Mexico knows the term virtolero, but once you remind them of what it means, there is generally recognition. That being said, the Real Academia Española does not consider vitrolero to be a word. The Diccionario de Español Mexicano, on the other hand, knows the word well. The definition: Large glass container, more or less cylindrical in shape with a wide mouth, which is generally used to contain agua fresca or ponche. So, not only is the container common in Mexico, it is also unique to the country’s dialect of Spanish.
The problem is that the word’s root is counter to its modern use. Modern vitroleros are almost universally plastic, but linguistically the word has something to do with glass making (vidrio is glass.) Domestic glass blowing first came to Mexico in 1889 with the opening of a factory by Camilo Ávalos Razo in Mexico City. He would become Mexico’s most influential glass-blower, and his sons would go to Guadalajara to serve the tequila industry’s need for bottles.
Not long after, the beer industry in Monterrey led to the creation of a bottle factory. In 1909, Vidriera Monterrey opened to make bottles and other glass products for the city. They were linked by ownership to the city’s large brewery, Cervecería Cuauhtémoc. By 1968, the company had produced a whopping one billion glass bottles. It is worth noting that the present day version of that company is called Vitro–not so far off from our famous containers.
The earliest examples of vitroleros likely came out of one of the first industrial glass factories in Monterrey or Mexico City. While the containers would achieve widespread fame during the 50s and 60s, a search of Mexico’s newspaper archives, shows the first use of the term in 1913. The story reads as follows: A SWEET TOOTH–From the store of Gabriel Martinez, a vitrolero on top of the counter was stolen full of ‘tutti fruti’ by Francisco Diaz.” The thirsty thief was caught as he was sucking on a mint candy later that day.
It is interesting to note that the term tutti fruit has quotes as a borrowed term, while vitrolero is given at face value. This would suggest that the term was already in use at this time. The newspaper that published the story, El Pais, was a Mexico City publication, not to be confused with the prominent Spanish paper of today.
The 1913 story seems to use the term in the exact sense that we know it–a container for agua fresca–in this case a cocktail of flavors called tutti frutti. This would seem to signify a shift from traditional clay containers to commercial glass ones in the early 20th century. The National Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH,) has photographs of a glass, barrel container dating back to the 30s and 40s. We can also find advertisements for containers of this name during the 50s. Steadily, as commercial glass took over, so did the vitrolero.
We cannot say for sure where the first vitrolero came from, but they’ve been around for at least 100 years. For just as long, they have been holding refreshing, sweet, and colorful drinks. Now, not only should you be well educated on what agua fresca is, you should be able to appreciate the container in which it is sold too.
Los cuatro gatos. Agrupación madrileñista. Año II, núm. 7, diciembre de 1951. https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/ano-i-num-7-diciembre-de-1951/
Un Goloso. El Pais, 1913-07-07, https://hndm.iib.unam.mx/consulta/resultados/visualizar/558a37117d1ed64f16d29acb?resultado=1&tipo=pagina&intPagina=7&palabras=vitrolero
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