CLAN55

At a glance

CLAN55 is an artisanal mezcal from Santa María Quiegolani, a remote mountain village in the south of Oaxaca. Its defining feature is in the name: the flagship is bottled at close to 55 percent alcohol by volumeABV (alcohol by volume): the percentage of pure alcohol in the bottle. Traditional mezcal is often bottled at full strength, between roughly 45 and 55 percent, rather than cut down with water to a lower number., a high but traditional strength that leaves the spirit at full intensity rather than diluted toward a softer, more commercial profile.

Two things make CLAN55 unusual. The flagship espadín is produced only once a year, in the short window (roughly February to April) when the agaves reach full maturity after about eight years, so the annual output is naturally limited. And since 2017 the brand has deliberately stopped naming a single mezcalero on the label, choosing instead to credit the whole village, on the principle that everyone involved in a batch shapes the result. For a newcomer, that is the frame: a small, high-strength, village-made mezcal that travels mostly to drinkers in Europe.

How the mezcal is made

CLAN55 is made by the traditional artisanal method of the Oaxacan mountains. The agave hearts are roasted in a wood-fired pit oven, which gives the spirit its gentle smoke, then crushed, fermented, and distilled. The flagship comes off the still at its high natural strength and is not cut with water to a round number, which is part of why the batches are small: adding water is what would stretch a batch into more bottles, and CLAN55 chooses not to.

This is mezcal in the artisanal mould recognised by the mezcal standard (NOM-070-SCFI-2016A regulatory-standard NOM is a federal Mexican product norm. Unlike facility NOMs (4-digit identifiers of specific distilleries), a standard NOM defines the rules for an entire category of product: which raw materials are permitted, where the product may be made, how it must be processed, and how the bottle must be labeled. Standard NOMs are written as "NOM-XXX-SCFI-YYYY" where XXX is the standard number and YYYY is the year. NOM-070-SCFI-2016 (Mezcal). The official Mexican standard for mezcal production. Defines three production tiers (Mezcal Industrial, Mezcal Artesanal, Mezcal Ancestral) with specific equipment and method requirements for each, lists the permitted agave species and states, and governs labeling. Enforced by the Consejo Regulador del Mezcal (CRM).): pit-roasted, traditionally milled and fermented, and distilled without industrial shortcuts. Reviewers describe the espadín as intensely herbal and floral, the high proof carrying rather than masking the agave.

The range

The backbone is the annual espadín (Agave angustifolia), the cultivated agave behind most Oaxacan mezcal. Around it the brand releases occasional wild-agave limited editions, each typically under a hundred litres, made entirely from wild plants aged between roughly twelve and thirty years. Because those wild agaves take so much longer to mature and exist in such small quantity, these releases are genuinely scarce, even by the standards of single-varietal mezcal. The page does not list specific wild varietals here because the limited editions rotate and independent documentation of each is thin; what is well supported is the pattern of tiny, wild-agave, very-old-plant bottlings alongside the espadín flagship.

Where CLAN55 sits

CLAN55 belongs to the world of single-village Oaxacan mezcal made the traditional way and sold under its own name, distinguished by two choices: a deliberately high bottling strength and a deliberate refusal to build the brand around one named maestro. In that, it shares the artisanal, village-rooted DNA of houses like Rey Campero and Lalocura, while taking the opposite stance to the latter on personal authorship, since Lalocura is built around a single named mezcalero and CLAN55 explicitly is not. It also leans more toward the European market than many of its peers. Independent documentation is lighter than for the larger names, so the specifics here lean on reviewer and importer coverage.

See also