Walk into almost any serious cocktail bar in the United States today and you will find a back bar that tells a story twenty years in the making. Mezcal holds court alongside bourbon. Sotol commands its own shelf. A tequila flight sits waiting next to the whiskey options. The cocktail list devotes an entire section to agave. This is not an accident, and it did not happen overnight. It is the result of a long, complicated, and genuinely fascinating shift in the way American drinkers, bartenders, and importers think about spirits made from plants that have been growing in Mexican soil for thousands of years.
The story of how agave spirits moved from the margins of the American drinks world to its center is a story about culture, economics, bartender curiosity, and the slow collapse of some very persistent myths. It involves a handful of pivotal bars, a few missionary-level advocates, an explosion of small-scale producers, and a drinking public that was finally ready to pay attention.
The Margarita Did the Heavy Lifting (Whether It Meant To or Not)
For most of the twentieth century, tequila’s reputation in the United States rested almost entirely on two things: the Margarita and the shot. Neither one did much to encourage curiosity about what was actually in the glass. The Margarita, served in its sour-mix-and-salt-rim form from Tijuana to Times Square, was everywhere and genuinely beloved, but it obscured rather than revealed the spirit at its base. The shot, typically of the cheapest mixto available, was consumed in conditions not designed for contemplation. Tequila was for fun, for excess, for forgetting. It was not, in the American imagination, for savoring.
That perception began cracking in the 1990s, and much of the credit belongs to a bar in San Francisco’s Richmond District. At Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant, a third-generation family operation on Geary Boulevard, a bartender named Julio Bermejo had become obsessed with 100 percent agave tequila at a time when the category was still a niche even in Mexico. Bermejo started hosting tequila tastings, building relationships with producers, and eventually reworking the bar’s signature Margarita to highlight what a quality blanco or reposado could actually do. His version used fresh lime juice, agave nectar, and a 100 percent agave tequila, nothing else. No sour mix. No triple sec.
The Tommy’s Margarita became a pilgrimage drink. Bartenders from across the country and around the world came to taste it and understand why it worked. Bermejo’s evangelism planted seeds that would take another decade to fully flower, but the direction was clear: there was something worth paying attention to in the agave category, and it was not going to be found in a well bottle.
The Craft Cocktail Movement Opens the Door
The cocktail renaissance that took hold in American bars between roughly 2000 and 2010 created exactly the right conditions for agave spirits to gain serious ground. Bartenders who had rediscovered the pleasures of fresh citrus, house-made syrups, pre-Prohibition recipes, and quality base spirits were naturally drawn to ingredients that rewarded investigation. Tequila, in its better expressions, offered complexity, terroir, and craft production methods that spoke directly to the values of the new bartending culture.
Mezcal entered this world more slowly, but with considerable force. By the mid-2000s, a small group of importers had begun bringing in bottles from Oaxacan producers whose names were unknown outside of Mexico. The smokiness that characterized many of these spirits was polarizing at first. But in bars where bartenders were already rethinking everything, polarizing was often interesting. Smoke became a tool. Mezcal’s earthy depth became a counterpoint to citrus, a complement to bitter amaro, a way to add dimension to old cocktail templates that had started to feel familiar.
The Oaxacan Old Fashioned, created by bartender Phil Ward at Death and Co in New York City shortly after the bar opened in 2007, is probably the single most influential agave cocktail of the modern era. Ward split the base between reposado tequila and mezcal, added mole bitters and agave nectar, and produced something that was recognizably an Old Fashioned but unmistakably its own thing. The drink appeared on countless menus in the years that followed. More importantly, it demonstrated to a generation of bartenders that mezcal could anchor a serious cocktail, not just add a smoky flourish to one.
The Import Explosion and the Education Problem
As bartender demand for mezcal grew through the 2010s, the number of bottles reaching American shelves multiplied rapidly. Brands that had been essentially invisible in the United States a few years earlier began finding distribution. New importers entered the market, some with deep relationships in Oaxaca, others chasing a trend. The category grew fast enough that education struggled to keep pace.
The challenge was real. Mezcal is not a single thing. It encompasses dozens of agave species, multiple production methods, and a geographic range that extends well beyond Oaxaca into states including Durango, Guerrero, San Luis Potosi, and Zacatecas, among others. A mezcal made from wild-harvested tobala in a clay pot still tastes nothing like one made from cultivated espadin in a stainless steel distillery. Explaining this to a bar guest in the thirty seconds available before their attention drifts requires either a very skilled bartender or a very motivated drinker.
The industry responded in several ways. Spirits competitions began creating dedicated agave categories. Brands invested heavily in bartender education programs, flying bartenders to visit distilleries in Oaxaca and elsewhere. The Tales of the Cocktail Foundation and similar organizations started programming seminars specifically on agave. A handful of dedicated agave bars opened in major cities, creating spaces where depth of selection and staff knowledge could develop together. None of this solved the education problem entirely, but it built a foundation that the category continues to build on.
Beyond Tequila and Mezcal
One marker of how far the agave category has traveled is the growing presence of spirits that, ten years ago, almost no one outside of their home regions had heard of. Sotol, made from the Dasylirion plant in Chihuahua, Durango, and Coahuila, has found a foothold in adventurous bar programs. Raicilla, a category of agave distillate from Jalisco with its own denomination of origin formalized in 2019, has moved from curiosity to genuine presence in specialty bottle shops. Bacanora, made from the Agave pacifica in Sonora, is increasingly available to those willing to seek it out.
These spirits do not share a single flavor profile. They do not appeal to the same drinker in the same way. What they share is the attention of bartenders and spirits enthusiasts who have already gone deep on tequila and mezcal and are looking for the next layer of understanding. The agave world is not a single destination; it is a region with many territories, and the most engaged drinkers are only beginning to map it.
What the Bar Program Looks Like Now
The contemporary cocktail bar’s relationship with agave spirits has matured past the point of novelty. In cities with active cocktail cultures, a thoughtful agave selection is simply expected. Bars that specialize in the category have appeared in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Austin, Denver, and elsewhere, offering selections that can run to hundreds of expressions. Tasting flights organized by region, agave species, or production method have become standard practice in these spaces, applying the same framework that whiskey bars have long used to guide drinkers through a category.
On cocktail menus, agave spirits now appear not just in their expected roles but across the entire menu. A tequila-based Martinez. A mezcal Negroni built around a particularly funky expression. An Aperol Spritz riff that swaps in a floral blanco for the wine base. Bartenders have learned these spirits well enough to use them with the same confidence they bring to gin or rye, reaching for them when the flavor makes sense rather than when the trend demands it. That is, arguably, the real sign that a spirit category has arrived.
The cantina, for its part, was never a lesser place. Mexican drinking culture has centuries of context and sophistication that American bar culture is still in the process of understanding. The best thing that happened when agave spirits crossed the border into the cocktail world was not that they got dressed up in craft cocktail clothing. It was that enough people took them seriously enough to learn where they came from.