"The perils of the mezcal boom"

The title is more ominous than the AFP article and video piece but it does provide a great snapshot of the mezcal industry now. A few distillers have created their own brands and managed to crack the North American market like El Jolgorio which is featured here. They have been a big and colorful force in the United States over the past year along with Vago and similar brands controlled by their producers.

Other distillers continue a long business of selling their product through intermediaries so that it ends up white labeled. This can be dicey for both sides since brands don’t control a stable supply while producers don’t have a stable outlet for their production. We’ve seen contracts broken and unhappy partners left and right. We’ve also seen this business structure continue to work just fine so it probably won’t disappear soon.

But this video also highlights two big issues: First, some, no one is sure how many, distillers are finding it difficult to enter these paths to the new markets. The competition in Mexico is growing as the international market grows and new sources for mezcal open up like the state of Michoacan which has barely touched the North American market. But the issue where we’d really like to see more on-the-ground reporting is on sustainability because it’s such an important and tricky problem to address.