Sources

The Discovery Deck and our agave directory are built on the work of experts: botanists, producers, and the writers who have been documenting mezcal for years. This page shows where our facts come from and how we put them together.

The number we quote most

About 85% of mezcal is made from a single agave, espadín.

Espadín (Agave angustifolia) made up 84.53% of certified mezcal production in 2025, according to COMERCAM, the council that certifies mezcal in Mexico.

COMERCAM (Consejo Mexicano Regulador de la Calidad del Mezcal), Informe Estadístico 2026, p. 7, Tabla 2. Read the report (PDF, in Spanish)

The figure covers certified mezcal only.

How we chose 40 agaves

We’ve been tasting mezcal and asking questions for about ten years. In September 2025 we started writing it all down, beginning with a list of more than 50 agaves linked to mezcal. We cut it to agaves you can actually find in a bottle, because that’s the whole point: discover more, taste more. Every agave in the deck is in a bottle you can buy, or on its way to one.

Some made the cut because they’re rare, some because they’re everywhere, and a few because they show how tangled agave names get.

One plant, many names

The 40 cards cover 22 botanical species, plus varieties, a subspecies, and two agaves without a settled botanical name. That’s on purpose. Botanists still debate where one agave species ends and another begins, and common names change from region to region. One species can go by several names, and one name can mean different plants in different places.

Agave karwinskii alone appears five times, as Cuishe, Barril, Madrecuixe, Bicuixe and Tobaziche. Producers treat them as different plants, and they make different mezcal.

Two cards, Lumbre and Chuparrosa, say Agave sp. because there’s no settled botanical name for them yet. We’d rather say so than guess. Where our sources disagreed, we went back and forth, and we may still change our minds as we learn more.

Where the card details come from

Names and botany. Botanical names, ranges, heights and growing conditions come from the references below, cross-checked against mezcal writers and producers.

Flavor. The three flavor words on each card come from our own tasting and from how producers and tasters describe each agave, using a short vocabulary we built from the themes they keep coming back to. Treat them as a starting point.

Nicknames. The nicknames are ours, there to help you remember the plant.

Producers and bottles

Our directory lists more than 80 producers across all 40 agaves, with links to where you can buy each bottle. The listings come from producers’ own sites and from retailers. We check the links and take down bottles that sell out. No producer pays to be listed, and we don’t ask anyone to pay. If you make one of these mezcals and want to be added or corrected, email us.

Our main references

Books and official sources

Mezcal guides and writers

We also used producers’ own agave pages, general encyclopedias and nursery listings to cross-check basics like height and leaf shape.

Spotted something wrong?

Tell us at hola@mezcalomano.com. We’d rather be corrected than stay wrong.

Last updated October 2026.