Mezcal: what it is, how to drink it and how it differs from tequila

On a site about homemade liqueurs, mezcal is a guest, and it is worth saying so right away: it is not a liqueur, because it has no sugar, and you cannot make it at home, because distilling at home is illegal in the United States without a federal permit (and a crime in Italy). Still, it is one of the bottles people most often buy without knowing what they are holding, and a mezcal label says far more than the label of an amaro. Here is how to read it, how much alcohol and how many calories are inside, and what you can legally do with a bottle you have already bought.

What is mezcal and where does it come from?

Mezcal is produced only within the Denominación de Origen Mezcal, and certification under NOM-070-SCFI-2016 is what gives it the right to the name. In 2023, 12.2 million liters were produced, 90.51% of them in Oaxaca. In Europe the name is protected by the 1997 agreement between the European Community and Mexico on spirit drinks.

The process starts from the piña, the heart of the plant left when the leaves are cut off. It is cooked, crushed, fermented with water and then distilled, usually twice. Cooking is the step that defines the product more than any other, and we will come back to it two sections down.

The designation of origin dates to the 1990s, and its historic core covers the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero, Durango, San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas, plus some municipalities of Guanajuato, Tamaulipas, Michoacán and Puebla. The perimeter has grown over the years through a long legal dispute between Mexico’s industrial property institute and the Oaxacan producers: Aguascalientes joined in April 2025, the State of Mexico in November of the same year as the tenth entity. It is a list that changes, and for anyone reading a label it matters little: what matters is that the NOM number and the certification body’s mark are there.

The Consejo Regulador publishes the numbers every year. Of the 12.2 million liters in 2023, almost 7.8 million were bottled for export, against 3.8 million for the domestic market. After Oaxaca come Puebla at 4.94%, Michoacán at 1.33% and Durango at 1.07%: geographic concentration is almost total.

What is the difference between mezcal and tequila?

Tequila is made from a single species of agave, Agave tequilana Weber blue variety, and in its “mixto” version can contain up to 49% of sugars that do not come from agave. Mezcal must be 100% agave and allows dozens of species. Both sit by law between 35% and 55% ABV, but cooking, territory and governing standard differ.

	Mezcal	Tequila
Standard	NOM-070-SCFI-2016	NOM-006-SCFI-2012
Agave species	More than thirty, espadín above all	Only Agave tequilana Weber blue
Agave percentage	100%, mandatory	100%, or “mixto” with at least 51%
Cooking	Underground conical pit over hot stones, masonry oven or autoclave, by category	Masonry oven or autoclave, no smoke; in industry also the diffuser
Territory	Oaxaca and the other states of the designation	Jalisco and some municipalities of four nearby states
Allowed strength	35% to 55%	35% to 55%

Historically, tequila is a mezcal that went its own way: it was the mezcal of Tequila, in Jalisco, and it got a designation and a standard of its own. The difference that weighs most on the shelf is the 100% agave one. A tequila that does not say “100% agave” on the label is a mixto, a product in which up to half the fermented sugars come from something else, typically sugarcane. With mezcal that doubt does not arise, because the current standard requires 100% agave.

A comparison with Italian liqueurs helps with scale: almost everything Italians drink after dinner is a sweetened infusion, not a straight spirit. It is the same distance there is between a mezcal and a limoncello.

Why does mezcal taste smoky?

The smoke is not an added flavor. It comes from cooking the agave hearts in a conical pit dug into the ground, over stones heated with wood, covered with fibers and earth for several days. The sugars absorb the smoke during cooking. In mezcals of the industrial category, cooked in autoclaves, the smoky note is much lighter.

The underground conical oven is a hole in the ground lined with stones, heated by burning wood on them. The agave hearts are piled on the red-hot stones, covered with the plant’s fibers and with earth, and left to cook for days. Contact with the scorching stone and the wood smoke does two things at once: it turns the agave’s complex sugars into fermentable ones and stamps the raw material with the smell you then find in the glass.

That has a practical consequence almost no product sheet mentions. The intensity of the smoke does not measure the quality of the mezcal: it measures the cooking method, the kind of wood and the time. A mezcal cooked in an autoclave is legitimately a mezcal and tastes little of smoke; an ancestral one cooked for four days underground tastes of it a lot. If smoke bothers you, the thing to look for on the label is the category, not the price.

What do “artesanal” and “ancestral” mean on the label?

They are two of the three categories in the standard, and they must be printed on the front of the bottle. “Mezcal” is the most permissive and allows autoclaves, mechanical mills and industrial stills. “Mezcal Artesanal” requires a conical or masonry oven, traditional crushing and distillation in copper or clay. “Mezcal Ancestral” is the strictest of all.

Category	Cooking	Crushing	Distillation	Additives
Mezcal	Underground pit, masonry oven or autoclave	Industrial mills and diffusers allowed	Copper pot stills or steel columns	Allowed within the standard’s limits
Mezcal Artesanal	Underground conical pit or masonry oven	By mallet, tahona or animal-drawn mill	Copper or clay still, direct fire	Forbidden
Mezcal Ancestral	Underground conical pit only	By mallet, tahona or animal-drawn mill	Clay still only, with a clay or wooden cap	Forbidden

The additives row is the one traditional producers cite most, because it is the only difference you cannot taste on a careless sip: in the two traditional categories nothing may be adjusted after distillation, while the industrial category tolerates some additions. The word “artesanal” on the label is therefore not a marketing promise like “artisanal” on so many products: it is a legal category with a list of allowed and forbidden machinery. It is the difference between declaring a method and declaring an intention, and worth keeping in mind when reading any label.

How do you read a mezcal label?

The standard requires the front of the bottle to show the category and class, the words “100% agave”, the species of maguey used, the lot number and the NOM number. The hologram of the certification body proves that lot was inspected. A mezcal without these is not a certified mezcal.

The classes describe what happened after distillation, and the times are set by the standard.

Class	What it means
Joven or Blanco	No time in wood and no aging: the spirit as it comes off the still
Madurado en Vidrio	More than 12 months in glass containers of 5 to 20 liters, underground or away from light and temperature swings
Reposado	2 to 12 months in wooden containers
Añejo	More than 12 months in wooden containers of less than 1,000 liters
Abocado con	With something added after distillation, for example the maguey worm
Destilado con	Distilled together with another ingredient, for example fruit or meat

The name of the agave species is the information that changes the product more than the class. Seeing “espadín” or “tobalá” tells you which plant the spirit comes from, and so which aromas to expect and why the price is what it is. The standard allows both the scientific and the traditional name, and bottles generally show the latter.

One last technical detail that works as a clue to authenticity: the standard sets methanol content between 30 and 300 mg per 100 ml of anhydrous alcohol. The upper limit is a safety threshold and surprises no one, but the lower one is more interesting. A real agave spirit always contains a little methanol, because it comes from the plant’s pectins; a product cut with industrial alcohol would have too little. The lower threshold is there to catch exactly that.

Which agaves are used, and why do they change the price?

Espadín (Agave angustifolia) accounts for 80 to 90% of the mezcal produced: it is cultivated and matures in 6 to 8 years. Wild agaves cost much more because they take much longer to grow: tobalá (Agave potatorum) takes 10 to 15 years, tepeztate (Agave marmorata) can take up to 25. Each plant is harvested only once.

This explains the prices better than any talk of luxury. Agave is not a plant you prune: to make mezcal you cut out the heart, and the plant dies. A bottle of wild tobalá contains plants that took ten or fifteen years to grow on a rocky slope, harvested by hand and not replanted. A bottle of espadín contains plants grown in orderly rows, ready in six to eight years.

The other species you see most often on labels are madrecuishe and its relatives (Agave karwinskii), recognizable by their long stem, and arroqueño (Agave americana), large and slow. Each gives a different profile, but the order of magnitude of the price is almost always set by growing time.

The problem of harvesting slow-growing wild plants is not theoretical, and it is the same one that comes up with mountain botanicals for herbal liqueurs: if demand grows faster than the plant, the plant loses.

How strong is mezcal, and how many calories does it have?

The standard allows 35% to 55% ABV, and the true value is the one on the label. At 45% and with no sugar, a mezcal provides about 248 kcal per 100 ml, that is 75 kcal in a 30 ml (1 fl oz) glass. A homemade limoncello at 30% with 250 g of sugar per liter provides 266, that is 80 per glass.

The math uses the same formula as the rest of the site: calories per 100 ml are the ABV times 5.52, plus grams of sugar per liter divided by ten and multiplied by 4. The 5.52 factor comes from the density of ethanol, 0.789 g/ml, and the 7 kcal per gram that alcohol provides. In a spirit the second term is zero, because there is no sugar.

Product	ABV	Sugar	kcal / 100 ml	30 ml glass
Mezcal at the legal minimum	35%	0 g/L	193	58 kcal
Mezcal	40%	0 g/L	221	66 kcal
Mezcal	45%	0 g/L	248	75 kcal
Mezcal	48%	0 g/L	265	80 kcal
Mezcal at the legal maximum	55%	0 g/L	304	91 kcal
Homemade limoncello	30%	250 g/L	266	80 kcal

The comparison between the fourth row and the last surprises almost everyone: a mezcal at 48% and a homemade limoncello at 30% come out even, 265 kcal against 266. Eighteen points of difference are made up by the 250 grams of sugar per liter in the limoncello and not in the spirit.

Is there really a worm in mezcal?

The worm is not an ancient tradition. Jacobo Lozano Páez put it in the bottle in the 1940s, to set his mezcal apart from tequila commercially. The standard treats it as the class “abocado con”, that is mezcal with something added after distillation. You will not find it in artesanal and ancestral mezcals, because additions are forbidden in those categories.

The story is documented and recent. Lozano Páez, a painter from Chihuahua who moved into the liquor trade, bottled mezcal bought in Oaxaca in Mexico City and had the problem of standing out among shelves of tequila. The maguey worm, the larva that lives in the plant and is eaten in Mexico, solved the identity problem in one go.

From that came the belief that the worm is a sign of authenticity or strength. It is not: it is a product class, and the only one in which the standard allows something to be added. Worm salt served next to the glass is something else, a seasoning of dried larvae, salt and chili, and has nothing to do with how the bottle is classified.

How do you drink mezcal?

At room temperature, in a small glass or a clay copita, in small sips. Cold closes up the aromas and a wide glass scatters them. The traditional accompaniment is an orange slice with worm salt, not the salt and lime ritual associated with tequila. The first sip only gets your palate used to it.

In Mexico they say mezcal is drunk a besos, with little kisses. The reason is practical: at 45% the first contact numbs, and the aromas come through from the second or third sip on. Downing it in one go is the fastest way to taste nothing of what you paid for.

If you use it in cocktails, treat it as a substitute for tequila, not as a neutral ingredient: the smoky side comes through before everything else and needs balancing. A margarita made with an espadín is a different drink from one made with a blanco tequila, and in most cases wants less syrup.

Can you make a liqueur with mezcal at home?

Distilling at home is illegal in the United States without a federal permit, and in Italy it is a crime punishable by prison. Starting from a bottle that has already been distilled and legally bought is a different matter entirely: it is the ordinary infusion used to make limoncello and amari.

In short: the alcohol has to be bought ready-made, and from there infusing, sweetening and diluting it for your own use is up to you.

Mezcal as a base for an infusion has one advantage and one drawback. The advantage is that it already brings its own aroma, so you do not need to load it with botanicals. The drawback is the price: starting from a bottle of mezcal costs far more than starting from neutral alcohol, and it only makes sense if you want that aroma in the glass.

Here are three ways to turn half a bottle of 45% mezcal into a liqueur, with the math already done. The final volume accounts for the space dissolved sugar takes up, about 0.63 ml per gram.

How you cut it	Final volume	ABV	Sugar	kcal / 100 ml
500 ml mezcal + 150 g sugar, no water	595 ml	37.8%	252 g/L	310
500 ml mezcal + 100 g sugar + 150 ml water	713 ml	31.6%	140 g/L	230
500 ml mezcal + 200 g sugar + 200 ml water	826 ml	27.2%	242 g/L	247

You can redo the math by hand in two steps. The pure alcohol never changes: half a liter at 45% contains 225 ml of ethanol. Only the total volume changes, and the final ABV is the ratio between the two. In the first row: 225 divided by 595 is 0.378, that is 37.8%.

A last word on storage: the first row stays above 35% and behaves like a spirit, while the third drops to 27% and should be treated as a liqueur to drink within a reasonable time.

Frequently asked questions

This article describes a commercial product and contains no affiliate links. The section on infusing covers personal use of a legally purchased spirit: distilling your own remains illegal without a permit, and high-proof alcohol should be handled away from flames and heat. This content is for readers 21 and over.