Cachetón
A regional agave local name, "wide-cheeked" in Spanish, attached to Puebla and Guerrero market-circulation spirits. The underlying species is not stable across sources; treat as a label-level identity first and a botanical identity second.
Regions: Puebla, Guerrero
Cachetón is a Spanish-language folk name meaning "wide-cheeked" or "chubby-cheeked," from cachete (cheek) with the augmentative suffix -ón. The descriptor presumably refers to the visual character of the agave rosette or the piña (the cooked heart of the plant), though no producer literature reviewed for this entry commits to a single morphological cue.
What is uncertain. This is one of the more genuinely unstable local names in the agave-spirit vocabulary. Different sources map cachetón to materially different plants. Some market-facing listings associate it loosely with the jabalí family (a name often attached to A. convallis, a notoriously difficult-to-ferment species). Other listings place it closer to A. oteroi, a separate small-rosette species described in the 2020s. Neither attribution is well-attested in primary botanical literature, and this site does not commit to either. A third possibility, supported by the name's geographic footprint in Puebla, is that cachetón is a regional label for forms of Agave potatorum, the species more commonly called tobalá. The honest reading is that the underlying species is not settled.
What is more settled. The geographic footprint sits in Puebla and, in some market circulation, Guerrero. The spirits sold under this name tend to be small-batch, wild-harvested distillates from producers operating outside the Mezcal denomination's main Oaxacan corridor. Tasting notes across the few public listings describe the distillates as resinous, herbal, energetic, and prone to foamy or challenging fermentation behavior, all of which are characteristic of the jabalí-family agaves and not of the gentler potatorum-family material. That sensory cluster is the strongest available evidence for a jabalí-adjacent reading, but it is sensory evidence from a handful of bottles, not botanical evidence.
Editorial position. The page does not assert a species mapping. The label travels under producer attribution, and the underlying plant should be verified against the specific bottle's documentation rather than against a default. The botany chapter discusses this kind of name-instability problem in its broader treatment of how local agave names map (and fail to map) cleanly onto Linnaean species.