Capón
The practice of cutting off an agave's flowering stalk (the quiote) before it can emerge, keeping the stored sugars in the piña instead of letting them be withdrawn into the flower.
Capón (from the Spanish capón, "to castrate") is the agricultural practice of cutting an agave's emerging quiote (flowering stalk) before it can rise from the rosette. Without the quiote draining the plant's stored sugars upward to fuel flower production, the carbohydrate reserves remain concentrated in the piña, the heart of the plant, which becomes denser and sweeter. The plant is then harvested before it can attempt to flower again.
Capón is the default in commercial agave cultivation. Most commercial A. tequilana and most cultivated A. angustifolia espadín plantings never flower; the jimadores who harvest them perform capón as a routine field practice. The practice is also widespread in mezcal cultivation, where producers face the same trade-off between piña sugar concentration and reproductive opportunity. A. salmiana used for pulque production undergoes a related but distinct intervention (the heart cavity is hollowed out for aguamiel extraction rather than the quiote simply cut), but the principle is the same: the plant is prevented from completing its monocarpic life cycle so that its sugar reserves can be harvested instead.
The cultural and ecological cost of capón is the subject of Section 6 of the botany chapter. Agave flowers are the nectar source that supports the long-nosed-bat migratory corridor between central Mexico and the Sonoran Desert, and an agave that never flowers is, from the bat's perspective, ecologically dead. The Bat Friendly™ certification (Tequila Interchange Project + Bat Conservation International, 2016) requires that producers allow at least 5 percent of mature agaves to flower naturally. A "Tequilana Capón" mezcal, where the producer explicitly identifies the technique on the label, is signaling artisanal care, but it is the same destructive choice taken to its logical extreme.