THE NEXT MORNING, noticing that my sheets were covered with other people's love stains, I ran shrieking from my bed as if it were on fire. Feeling hungover but fulfilled, we headed back to Tequila to track down distillers we'd missed earlier. No luck. And that's when we ran into the Cuervo women. Curiosity trumped connoisseurship once again.

This afternoon, we're on the hunt for De la Sierra, climbing a rough dirt road up the 2,000-foot wall of a red mesa, following a map drawn by Jesus, the proprietor of Jarritos el Guero. "When you get to El Salvador, ask for it," he said.

After two hours, the road dumps us in El Salvador, a nearly deserted hamlet of wind-battered mud-brick houses. No one has heard of De la Sierra-not the two men on the plaza, not the men in the grimy cantina, and not the lonely woman selling candy, who simply looks away, like we've come to kidnap her son. We wander the streets looking for someone-anyone-and feeling stumped.

"Do you know De la Sierra?" we ask a man resembling Burt Reynolds with a belly.

When he says no, we snap and tell him our frustrating story-how we happened to meet these Cuervo ladies, how we limped up here in a wimpy car, etc. At the end of our lament, he looks at us, smiles, and leads us through a courtyard to the back of a garage, where three dusty barrels sit in a dark corner. "I make De la Sierra," he announces, introducing himself as Miguel.

Miguel is a zucchini farmer. Even with his farm obligations, he still turns out about 20,000 liters of 110-proof De la Sierra annually. He sells the blanco to Jesus and keeps this extra añejo for himself, his family, and his friends. It costs a buck per liter to make and, yes, he says matter-of-factly, it's illegal. "Do you want to see the distillery?" he asks. Heck, yeah!

We pack into the cab of a Toyota pickup, leave town on a side street, and bounce across open ranchland. I have no idea where we are. After a half-hour, Miguel hops out to undo a section of barbed-wire fence. We drop down into a valley of white oak. And there it is beside a stream: Miguel's hooch factory.

"This is how you make good tequila," he says, pointing to a tar-paper roof propped over vats of agave mulch and a steaming, sweating brick outbuilding. An old man in a camo jacket looks on silently while we inspect the propane-powered blast furnace with the jury-rigged exhaust pipe. We sample the water coming from a hose stuck in a nearby spring. We ogle the monstrous agaves growing wild. We pull open the small iron door of the soot-black oven and climb inside.

When we step out, Miguel offers us samples, two plastic Mega Big Cola bottles, three liters each.

Tasted in the hotel that night, De la Sierra will display the delicate bouquet of wet fur, the lively flavor of raw hot dogs, and the subtle burn of chiles marinated in chlorine. Tim will give his to the clerk at the rental-car agency. I will bring some home, where it will remain untouched, eating away at the plastic of my Nalgene.

But at that moment-lost in a gorgeous canyon, tasting one man's prized contraband-Tim and I are convinced that Miguel's Mexican moonshine is the best tequila ever, 100 percent crazy good.