“It’s kinda about preference—like, what do you like?” pondered Leanne Favre, halfway through our tasting of 17 expressions of mezcal priced under $50.
What the Leyenda head bartender meant was, there is now such an extraordinary selection of affordable and high-quality mezcal in America that the issue has become less about finding what is “good,” and more about figuring out what you’re looking for.
While mezcal has only really existed commercially since 1995, when Ron Cooper launched Del Maguey, it didn’t begin to gain a foothold in major American cities like New York and San Francisco until the last decade or so. It’s still, slowly but surely, branching out into secondary markets as it becomes more and more readily available (which is not necessarily a good thing).
Unlike, say, bourbon—which is still mostly produced in Kentucky or Tennessee using the exact same commodity grain distilled via massive, computer-controlled factories—mezcal often inherently uses artisanal, if not ancestral, methods: Agave plants are cooked in pits with hot stones; the hearts are mashed by hand with wooden mallets or a tahona (a large stone wheel); the products are fermented using ambient yeasts in everything from animal hides to hollowed-out tree trunks, and its distillation vessel, clay or copper, determined by where it comes from. Mezcal can be produced in different climates too, from high in the arid plateaus of San Luis Potosí to low in the narrow valleys of Oaxaca. Not to mention, it can be made from dozens of distinct agave varieties, many of them wild.
All of this results in an extremely diverse set of flavor profiles. Smokiness, which has become a shorthand descriptor for mezcal’s overall flavor profile, does not even begin to capture the range of flavors these distillates can produce, from ester-y tropical notes reminiscent of agricole rhum, to the grassy, peppery profiles that define so many of the mezcales made from Agave karwinskii varieties, to the earthy, red-fruited profile of those made from tobala. Even its signature smokiness exists on a spectrum that expresses itself in myriad ways. In other words, mezcal is not one thing.
“That’s what’s cool about mezcal,” says Favre, thinking of a typical customer that might be leery of the spirit. “I can always find one you’ll like.”
Our tasting confirmed not just this diversity, with an increase in options under $50 since our last tasting in October 2017, but also an impressive level of quality. In fact, it outperformed all other spirits categories we’ve blind-tasted in the last two years.
For this tasting, I was joined by PUNCH’s editorial staff as well as two mezcal experts: Favre and Dan Greenbaum, co-owner of Brooklyn’s Diamond Reef. Here are our favorites.
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