Bilia
One of the most unstable agave local names documented in this site's research set. Sometimes treated as a name associated with the Agave potatorum (tobalá) world; sometimes presented by market sources as a different plant entirely. Should be treated as producer-specific until the exact species is stated on the label.
Regions: Oaxaca, adjacent market and importer contexts
Bilia is one of the most unstable agave local names in this site's research set, and the page treats it that way rather than forcing a clean one-name, one-species mapping.
What the name usually points at. Some sources, including the Mezcalistas reference archive, place bilia in the broader Agave potatorum world, the same species group that anchors the much better-known local name tobalá. Under that reading, a "bilia" bottling is functionally a regional or producer-specific synonym for a potatorum-adjacent agave. The likely-species attribution on this page reflects that reading, but the editorial confidence on it is deliberately set to low: the name is not stable enough across producers, importers, and regional vocabularies to lift it any higher.
What the name sometimes points at instead. Other market-facing sources, including importer and bottle-listing pages, present bilia as something else entirely, a separate plant whose mapping to a Linnaean species the source does not always make explicit. The page does not attempt to enumerate those alternative species, because the public-source base is too thin to do so honestly. What the page asserts is the negative claim: bilia cannot be safely flattened to a single species without producer confirmation.
Editorial guidance. Bilia belongs to the same regional-instability family as cenizo, where the same name attaches to materially different plants depending on village, producer lineage, and importer translation. The safest hierarchy, restated from this site's editorial conventions, is: producer label outranks species on the label, and species on the label outranks the local name alone. A bottle marked only as "bilia" is a flag to ask for the underlying species; a bottle marked as "bilia, Agave potatorum" can be read at face value.
Why this matters for downstream data. If the page were to "fix" bilia to a single species, the assertion would propagate into search filters, flavor predictions, and cross-reference logic in ways that overstate what the underlying evidence supports. Holding the mapping open is the honest call. For the broader treatment of how local agave names map (and fail to map) onto Linnaean species, see the botany chapter's discussion of regional-instability names.
What this page does not assert. That bilia is definitively A. potatorum in every context. That there is a stable second species behind the alternative usages. That the name's etymology has been recovered from a documented indigenous-language source. The verifiable base is the producer label.