The Mezcal Production Process: From Agave to Bottle

Five stages stand between the plant and the glass. Every producer handles them differently, and those choices shape much of each mezcal's character.

1. Harvest

The maestro mezcalero picks plants by experience. For some species the quiote, the flower stalk, is cut first, and harvest follows six to twelve months later. Once the leaves are trimmed, what remains is the piña, the heart that will be cooked.

2. Cooking

The traditional method is a conical pit dug into the ground, lined with stone and fired with wood. The piñas are covered and cooked for days. Much of the smoke people associate with mezcal comes from that oven.

3. Milling

The cooked agave is crushed to release its juice, by hand with wooden mallets, with an animal-drawn stone mill, or with mechanical mills.

4. Fermentation

Usually spontaneous: wild yeasts and bacteria do the work, in vats or tanks where the juice ferments together with the agave fibre, the bagasse.

5. Distillation

Almost always twice. The first run lifts the alcohol from about 20–30% to an intermediate spirit; the second brings it to roughly 50–60%. Stills may be copper, clay, wood or stainless steel.

The standard separates categories by exactly these tools: which oven, which mill, which still. We explain it in Denomination of Origin and Regulation.