Agave on the Frontier

For 500 years agave spirits have been synonyms with Mexico but in just the last decade the world of agave spirits has grown and spread around the globe. As a fan of agave spirits this is an exciting time to taste this evolution in real time and witness how the terroir, culture, and people unique to each new region imprint themselves on the spirits.

Besides the agave spirits coming out of Venezuela which has its own historical roots, all others have been recent inventions that are in the process of creating their own identities.

Unlike other new world plants, agaves have had little economic utility or cultural significance outside of Mexico. Tomatoes, chilies, vanilla, and chocolate, spread around the world through the Columbian Exchange and entrenched themselves into the economics, cuisines, and cultures of the world. Meanwhile, agaves outside of Mexico have been largely kept as ornamental plants, as thorny barriers marking property lines, reserve animal fodder, and as potential sources of biofuel. However, as the popularity of tequila and mezcal has grown around the world, distillers have seen an opportunity to use locally grown agaves to tell their own unique stories.

American Agave Spirit

North of Mexico, a handful of California distillers have been experimenting with creating agave spirits that are unique to the Golden State. Some of the spirits have been made from an ensemble of wild agave varieties as well as farmed blue agave. A ranch in Yolo County has been planting blue agave and with the help of local farmers, providing distillers with a small and growing supply of plants. Yolo County is located in the northern portion of California’s Central Vally, about an hour and a half north of San Francisco, that stretches between Western Sacramento in the east and the Vaca Mountains in the west. The county has a Mediterranean climate which means it has hot dry summers and wet and mild winters. One of the most interesting things about California agave spirits is you can taste batch to batch and producer to producer how each is working out the best way they can express the character of California agave.

Some of these distillers include, Shelter Distilling located on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, as well as Venus Spirits and Ventura Spirits located at opposite ends of California’s Central Coast. Venus is on the northern end in Santa Cruz, and Ventura is on the southern end, right in the middle of the Ventura River Valley that cuts its way through the Santa Ynez Mountains. These three have all sourced blue agaves from Yolo County and both Shelter and Ventura cooked their agaves with steam, while Venus roasted their agaves in an earthen pit. Shelter decided to ferment the cooked agave juices with the fibres while Venus and Ventura fermented theirs without fibres. And all three were double pot distilled.

South American Agave Spirits

The natural range of agaves in the Americas extends from the semi-arid regions of Northern California to the Andes mountains, south of the equator. In Venezuela, people have been making agave spirits for hundreds of years. Known locally as ‘cocuy’, it is made from a species known as Agave cocui or agave verde (green agave). These green agaves grow in the arid costal mountains of western Venezuela that traverse the states of Lara and Falcón.

In 1954, cocuy made from 100 per cent agave was effectively banned to promote the growing rum industry and remained illegal to produce 100 per cent agave cocuy for the next five decades. However, the ban was not complete and like many other attempts at prohibition, clandestine distillers continued the tradition of making cocuy from 100 per cent agave. In 2006, the Venezuelan government lifted the ban and recognized cocuy as part of the country’s cultural heritage. According to Venezuela’s Geographic Indication for cocuy, the agave cocui can take eight to 14 years to mature before they are ready to be harvested. The agaves grow in the valleys and rocky hillsides of the coastal Andes mountains that cut through western Venezuela. Once harvested, they are often cooked in earthen pits similar to mezcal, fermented and distilled often with direct fire pot stills.

Indian Agave Spirits

From the Americas, agaves spread across the world and have made homes for themselves in India. Queen Victoria introduced agaves to India as a low-cost fencing system for the newly constructed railroad tracks. These were to prevent cows from being killed by passing trains and inflaming religious tensions with the British colonial government. These rail lines crisscrossed the Deccan Plateau which forms a large part of the Indian peninsula. The quick change in elevation from the west coast of India to the plateau cause the warm rising air to drop most of its moisture as rain on the coast leaving the interior of the country much dryer and more hospitable for agaves. Several varieties of agaves were introduced to India but by far the most successful has been a variety of agave americana that has thrived there for more than 150 years. Today there are two major brands of Indian agave spirits, Desmonji and Pistola Agavepura that are made with similar methods. Desmondji agave spirit was first created in 2011 by Desmond Nazareth.

After the agaves are harvested and trucked to the distillery, they are given a second closer shave to remove all of the remaining penca (leaf) from the heart of the agave. The agaves are quartered; steam cooked in an autoclave (giant stainless steel pressure cooker), and crushed with roller mills. The juice is then pumped to tanks and fermented before being distilled twice in large stainless steel pot stills.

Australian Agave Spirits

One of the newest agave spirits to enter the market comes from Northeast Australia. Similar to other parts of the world, agaves arrived in Australia sometime in the 19th century primarily as ornamental plants or fencing. However, in the first decade of the 21st century the Australian Government funded a project to produce biofuel from agaves. Hundreds of thousands of blue agaves were planted in the semi-arid landscape of Queensland outside the town of Collinsville.

Collinsville sits at the same latitude as other topical regions but it gets very little rain because it sits in a valley between the of the Great Dividing Range Mountains. As with the Deccan Plateau, when warm wet air hits the Great Dividing Range most of the rain falls on the eastern slopes of the mountains making the interior much dryer. However, when funding for the biofuel project dried the plants remained in the ground. In 2021, as many of the agaves were reaching maturity, a company called Top Shelf International came in and built a distillery to produce Australia’s first agave spirit. The agaves are steam cooked in repurposed shipping containers, crushed with an old wine press and the after fermentation the resulting liquid is double pot distilled.

Agave’s future is unfolding far beyond its ancestral roots. What began in Mexico is now inspiring creativity across continents, where distillers are learning to speak the language of agave in their own accents. From Venezuela to Australia, each experiment hints at what’s next. The world isn’t just discovering agave’s past; it’s shaping its future, one spirit at a time.