Species
27 agave and Dasylirion species — the plants that build every Mexican spirit’s flavor, filterable by genus and IUCN status.
27 agave and Dasylirion species — the plants that build every Mexican spirit’s flavor, filterable by genus and IUCN status.
Showing 24 of 24
Agave americana
A widely distributed, slow-maturing agave whose regional names (Arroqueño, Sierra Negra, Coyote) sit on a genuinely tangled taxonomy, and whose piñas feed three distinct Mexican drinking traditions: comiteco, mezcal, and regional pulque.
Agave angustifolia
The workhorse of mezcal and the foundation of Bacanora; the most domesticated, widely planted, and genetically diverse agave in the spirits world.
Agave atrovirens
The third corner of the pulquero complex, slower-maturing than salmiana or mapisaga and the only one of the three to reach onto the cool volcanic slope of central Veracruz.
Agave convallis
The wild Oaxacan agave behind jabalí mezcal, defined by an unusually high saponin load that makes its piñas dramatically foam during fermentation and turns every release into a test of the maestro's craft.
Agave cupreata
The signature wild-to-semi-managed mezcal agave of Guerrero, recognized by its heart-shaped leaves and the slow seed-grown propagation that distinguishes the Sierra Madre del Sur palenques from the clonal fields of Tequila country.
Agave durangensis
The defining mezcal agave of Durango, source of the state's regional flavor identity and a textbook case of common-name instability across northern Mexico.
Agave inaequidens
The interior-Jalisco raicilla agave at the center of the inaequidens/cupreata/hookeri domestication continuum.
Agave karwinskii
The trunked, columnar mezcal agave whose ten-plus producer-recognized sub-varieties make it the most taxonomically unsettled species in the spirits world.
Agave mapisaga
The largest of the three pulqueros, paired with salmiana and atrovirens in the pulque complex, and the workhorse maguey of the lower-elevation pulque belt around the State of México.
Agave marmorata
A cliff-dwelling wild agave that takes 25 to 35 years to mature, prized for high-end silvestre mezcal and structurally vulnerable to over-harvest.
Agave maximiliana
The signature mountain agave of Jalisco's sierra raicilla tradition, and the first agave with a published somatic-embryogenesis propagation protocol.
Agave oteroi
A small-rosette agave of the Puebla orbit, named in honor of the Mexican botanist Manuel Otero and one of several candidate species behind the unstable local name cachetón. Research coverage in primary literature is thin, and this page is deliberately short.
Agave potatorum
The small, slow, cliff-dwelling wild agave behind premium silvestre mezcal, and the conservation flagship of the genus.
Agave rhodacantha
A tall, narrow Pacific-slope agave with red-tipped marginal teeth, used for mezcal in Oaxaca and for coastal raicilla in Jalisco and Nayarit.
Agave salmiana
The principal pulque agave, tapped for its sweet sap (aguamiel) for at least two thousand years, and distilled into mezcal in San Luis Potosí.
Agave shrevei
The northwest-Mexico desert agave most commonly meant when "lechuguilla" or "churique" names a spirit in Chihuahua's Sierra Tarahumara and the Sonora-Chihuahua border country. Not to be confused with Agave lechuguilla Torr., the unrelated Chihuahuan Desert fiber species.
Agave tequilana
The single agave legally permitted in Tequila production, and the most genetically uniform spirit-producing crop in the Americas.
Agave valenciana
A recently described Sierra raicilla agave confined to a narrow corner of Jalisco's Sierra Occidental, distilled alongside maximiliana and inaequidens after a century of being lumped in with them.
Dasylirion cedrosanum
The heartland Dasylirion of the Sotol DO, legally named in the Mexican norm and widely considered the finest desert-spoon species for spirit.
Dasylirion durangense
One of only two Dasylirion species named in Mexico's Sotol standard, and the regional sotol plant of Durango, quietly worked and commercially overshadowed by its Chihuahuan cousins.
Dasylirion leiophyllum
The smooth-leaved desert spoon of the Chihuahua and Coahuila highlands, widely distilled into sotol despite not being named in the Sotol norm.
Dasylirion lucidum
A Dasylirion endemic to the Sierra Sur of Oaxaca, distilled outside Mexico's Sotol denomination of origin and sold under regional "Cucharilla" and "Destilado de Dasylirion" labels.
Dasylirion texanum
The green desert spoon whose species name honors its Texas type locality but whose range reaches well into northern Mexico, so a "texanum" sotol is not necessarily a Texas-made one.
Dasylirion wheeleri
The most widely distributed sotol plant in the Chihuahuan Desert, traditionally distilled into sotol for centuries but conspicuously absent from the legal species list in Mexico's official sotol norm.