Pierde Almas +9 Botanicals

At a glance

Pierde Almas +9 Botanicals is one of the most unusual bottles in modern Mexican drinking: a gin built on a mezcal base. To understand it, start with the two parents. A mezcal is a distilled spirit made from roasted agave, the spiky desert plant that also gives us tequila; the most common agave used for mezcal is espadín (Agave angustifolia), and the roasting in earthen pits is what gives mezcal its signature campfire smoke. A gin is a spirit flavored so that juniper leads the aroma; juniper is the small, piney, resinous berry of an evergreen shrub, and by long tradition it is the one botanical (the term for the herbs, seeds, roots, and peels that flavor a gin) a spirit must taste of to be called gin at all.

Most gins start from a clean, flavorless neutral spirit and let the botanicals do all the talking. Pierde Almas does the opposite. It takes a finished espadín mezcal, already smoky and full of character, and redistills it with nine classic gin botanicals. Redistillation means running the spirit through the still a second time, this time with the botanicals in the path of the rising vapor so their oils are drawn into the final liquid. The result keeps the agave smoke underneath and lays a juniper-forward gin profile over the top. It is bottled at between 43 and 45% alcohol by volume (ABV is the standard measure of a spirit's strength).

Not strictly a gin, not strictly a mezcal

The "+9" in the name is the whole idea: nine botanicals added to the mezcal. They are the canon of the classic London-style gin recipe: juniper, coriander, star anise, fennel, orange peel, cassia bark (a cinnamon-like tree bark), angelica root, orris root (the dried root of an iris, prized as a fixative that holds the other aromas together), and nutmeg. Run those over an espadín mezcal and you land in a curious regulatory gap. Because juniper leads, the liquid behaves like what the spirits world calls a compound or redistilled gin, the same broad family as the big international juniper brands. But the base is not neutral grain; it is smoky Oaxacan agave, which no standard gin uses. So +9 Botanicals is, strictly speaking, neither one thing nor the other, and it sits at the experimental edge of the wider Mexican gin story.

This site treats it under the gin family because juniper defines its top note and the gin-botanical recipe defines its construction, while flagging plainly that the foundation is mezcal. There is no Denomination of Origin at work here. A Denomination of Origin (DO) is a legal protection that ties a name like "tequila" or "mezcal" to a specific region and rulebook; "gin" is an international style with no Mexican DO behind it. Calling the agave base a mezcal in marketing carries its own regulatory weight, which is part of why the brand presents the bottle as a botanical spirit in its own category rather than forcing it into either box.

How it is made

The starting point is a conventional artesanal espadín mezcal: mature agave hearts roasted, crushed, fermented, and distilled in the traditional Oaxacan way, the same process behind the house's flagship mezcal. That mezcal is then redistilled a second time with the nine botanicals, so the juniper and spice oils ride into the finished spirit while the agave smoke survives the second pass. The exact botanical ratios and cut points are the producer's own, and this site does not invent figures that have not been published; what is well documented is the base spirit, the nine-botanical recipe, and the redistillation method.

The bottle comes from the Oaxacan label Pierde Almas, founded in 2008 by the American-born artist Jonathan Barbieri in partnership with the Sanchez distilling family of San Baltazar Chichicapam. Pierde Almas is best known for its agave releases, including its wild-rabbit pechuga (a style in which meat is hung in the still during distillation); +9 Botanicals is its category-bending outlier. The label was acquired by the multinational drinks group Diageo in 2018, which is what carried it onto back bars worldwide. As with the acquired and celebrity brands elsewhere on this site, the ownership is reported here as commercial fact, neither a seal of quality nor a mark against the liquid.

How it is drunk

+9 Botanicals exists because bartenders kept reaching for it. It makes a smoky negroni or a smoky martini that needs no extra effort: the agave does the smoke that a regular gin would have to borrow from a rinse of peated whisky or a separate mezcal float. Stirred down with vermouth, it reads as a gin drink with a mezcal shadow; built into a citrus-forward highball or a gin and tonic, the juniper and orange peel come forward and the smoke settles into the background. It can be sipped neat by anyone who enjoys both gin and mezcal and wants to taste the seam between them, though it rewards a cocktail context more than a contemplative pour. Because it is a hybrid, it tends to convert in both directions: gin drinkers curious about agave, and mezcal drinkers curious about botanicals, find a familiar handle to grab.

Sensory profile

The first thing up the nose is juniper, piney and clean, exactly as a gin should open, but it arrives wrapped in a low, dry wood smoke that no ordinary gin carries. Behind the juniper sits the spice rack of the recipe: warm star anise and fennel sweetness, a lift of orange peel, and the rounding, slightly powdery note of orris and angelica root that holds the aromas together. On the palate it is drier and more savory than a sweet contemporary gin, the agave base giving it a mineral, vegetal weight under the botanicals. The smoke is moderate rather than aggressive: present and unmistakable, but a supporting layer rather than the headline, less smoky than a straight mezcal and far smokier than any conventional gin. The finish is long, peppery, and herbal, with the juniper and the agave smoke trading the last word. It tastes, fittingly, like a conversation between two spirits that were never supposed to meet.

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