About Mezcal Report

We review mezcal. We taste every bottle we can find and score it.

Every review has the same parts: nose, palate, finish, and a verdict, with the proof, producer, agave, region, and price listed alongside. We taste and score each bottle before we read anyone else's notes or look at its community score, so the number we give is our own.

How we taste

Neat, in a clay copita, at room temperature, with no food alongside. We leave about ten minutes between bottles and write the notes with the glass in front of us, not from memory afterward.

The rubric

Bottles score from one to five agaves, in half-agave steps. A three is an average mezcal, one that does what it should. We judge each bottle against other mezcal rather than spirits in general, so a three means average for the category.

How we price

Every review lists a US headline price and the retailers we found stocking the bottle. We rotate through the national chains: Total Wine, Goody Goody, Spec's, BevMo, K&L, Astor, Old Town Tequila, Hi-Time, Mission, Caskers, ReserveBar. Plus a handful of mezcal-focused specialty stores. Prices and stock move; click through before you order.

What else you'll find

Every review lists the producer, maestro, agave, region, and ABV. Where a community score exists, we show it next to ours, and when another taster's notes are worth reading, we point to them under "Further reading."

Bylines

We don't run bylines. The people doing the tasting change from batch to batch, but they all work from the same rubric, and no one sees a bottle's price or its community score before scoring it.

The catalog as data

Everything we record goes into one dataset: scores, prices, proof, agave, region, production. Once a year we write up what it all adds up to, and The State of Mezcal is the current edition. We also log each bottle's retail price every time we refresh the catalog, so once a bottle has been checked more than once, its price history appears on its review.

Who pays for this

The site runs on ads. They're sold through a blind auction, so we don't choose the advertisers, know who they are ahead of time, or change anything we write for them. The details are on the privacy page.