Agave is More Than Tequila
What do Elon Musk, Kendall Jenner, and LeBron James all have in common? They, along with a host of other celebrities, own their own brands of tequila –the third best-selling spirit behind vodka and whiskey. The explosion of celebrity tequilas has contributed to rapid growth in the tequila market, with the volume of sales increasing by 356% between 2002 and 2023.
When someone hears the word ‘Agave,’ they often think of distilled beverages because of their popularity. However, over 100 different uses for agave have been documented, including roasting the hearts for food, eating the agave stalks, fermenting the sap for pulque or cooking it for syrup, and using plant fibers for clothes, sandals, building materials, instruments, and baskets.
Continuing to innovate agave’s uses and increasing its production – mindfully – holds the potential to help Arizona, and other places like Mexico, address its changing climate and market conditions. Meet some people working to make that happen.
Agave’s Rich History & Promising Future
Agave Blooms
Agaves are spiny desert plants native to the arid regions of the US and Mexico, with over 200 different species. The plant grows slowly, storing sap in its core for years to help it produce a single blooming stalk. During the growth of the agave plant, small "pups," or hijuelos, sprout and after a tall stalk of yellow flowers emerges, the original "mother" plant eventually dies.
Agave plants used for making spirits or eating are typically harvested right before they flower, when the plants have stored the most sugar. This can take between 4 - 40 years, though most commonly cultivated uses take between 5 - 10 years. After the spines are cut off, the sugar-rich cores – called piñas for their resemblance to pineapples — are harvested, cooked, and pressed to release a rich syrup that is processed into nectar or fermented into alcohol.
For thousands of years, agave has been a source of food, fiber, medicine, and spiritual practices for Indigenous cultures. The versatility and hardy characteristics of the plant– requiring little to no water and some species withstanding temperatures as high as 140°F – are why it has been revered in Mexican and Indigenous cultures for millennia. It’s also why it’s being highlighted as a climate-smart food crop.
Highlighting the traditions surrounding agave is part of the job of Dena Cowan, the Curator of Collections at Tucson-based Mission Garden, a living agricultural museum of Sonoran Desert-adapted heritage fruit trees, traditional local heirloom crops, and edible native plants.
“At Mission Garden we are honoring the deep history of agave cultivation. Agave has been an important source of food and fiber for the O’odham, Apache, Yoeme, Hualapai, Yavapai and Mexican cultures... and was cultivated on a large-scale by the Hu’hugam (the ancestors of the Tohono O’odham). We believe our role is important in raising awareness that for most of history, agave wasn’t just distillates like Mezcal,” said Cowan.
This past April, Tucson hosted the annual Agave Heritage Festival. Since 2008, the event has celebrated the cultural, commercial, and culinary significance of the agave plant and borderland culture.
“What started as a city-wide festival has become a regional festival with people coming from other places in the US, Mexico, and beyond,” explained Cowan.
This year, as part of the festival, Mission Garden hosted an Agave Roast and Learn event where attendees participated in a live agave roasting pit activity. Roasting pits have been used for thousands of years to cook the hearts of agave or preserve in various ways, including dehydration. The event also included a panel discussion of the plant's potential as an alternative crop for agriculture in arid environments. The panel highlighted sustainable uses for agave, such as animal feed, biofuels, fire starters, construction materials, textiles, instruments, pots, dish scrubbers, and body sponges.
“Envisioning other uses for agave is incredibly important,” Dena pointed out. “The distillates made from agave are popular and in high demand, but the process for making them on a large-scale uses a lot of resources, such as water and wood to roast the agave. Other uses of agave could be more sustainable.”
Dena advocates looking to the past for insights into how to help Arizona address some of its climate and water challenges.
Agave Harvest
“We can look to traditional knowledge and historical uses of agave to help us answer the question of how the state is going to grow food in the future, “ she explained. “Water harvesting techniques and growing species of agave that have been cultivated and grown in the Sonoran-Desert area for millenia could be part of our future in terms of farming and transition to a more drought-tolerant, climate-smart farming system, as well as experimenting with other ways to grow agave in ever-changing climate conditions. ”
Some experiments include partnering with producers like Oatman Flats Ranch to grow agave in soils with high salinity and clay characteristics and intercropping with nurse plants like Mesquite, Palo Verde, and Ironwood trees. Other trials will involve irrigating agave crops with a small amount of water to help get them established, as Arizona has been receiving consistently less rainfall. Mission Garden is also dedicating a plot in their Tomorrow’s Garden to experiment with growing food for the future, which will include updates to the original design and planting agave using a companion planting polycropping system with varying amounts of water and shade and a dryland setting.
“What’s the Difference Between Tequila and Mezcal?”
Preserving Agave Farms with Ancestral Syrup
Farmers need markets. After a crop is harvested, it must go somewhere, and often quickly, before it spoils. If you ask a farmer to grow a crop, their response will most likely be - “Is there a market for it?” So, when a popular beer company approached farmers in Mexico to stop growing agave and, instead, grow barley for their beer production market, you think they would have struck gold: a built-in, guaranteed market. Except, collecting that gold means asking them to abandon their ancestral practices as agave farmers.
Lou Bank is the host of the “Agave Road Trip” podcast and founder of the nonprofit S.A.C.R.E.D (Saving Agave for Culture, Recreation, Education, and Development), an organization that works to help improve quality of life in rural Mexico, particularly by ensuring families who find themselves outside the Mezcal Denomination of Origin can access the resources they need to continue their cultural practices.
Open Fermenter
Closed Fermenter
Bank has been working in the nonprofit sector since 1999 and believes a good nonprofit does one of two things, or both: preserves an at-risk resource and/or leverages an underutilized resource. Bank has worked on projects such as building nurseries and greenhouses in Jalisco to grow varieties of agave and other native plants that are at risk of becoming extinct. The seedlings are then given to families and agave farmers that are producing heritage agave spirits.
Bank spends a lot of his time in rural Mexico. What strikes him most about working with these communities is their way of thinking.
“In Chicago, where I currently live, we are very much focused on efficiency. But in these rural communities, I’m not saying they are never efficient, but that doesn’t seem to be the focus. They recognized decades ago that doing something in a more efficient way doesn’t necessarily produce a better result,” explained Bank. “That’s illustrated, in one way, by how they choose to make spirits. It would be a lot more efficient for them to use closed fermenters. But, then, the flavor wouldn’t be the flavor they are chasing.”
The majority of families that Bank works with use open-air agave fermentation techniques, which is more labor- and time-intensive. However, the end-product of fermenting agave this way creates more unique flavors, the “best result” that these families strive to achieve.
Bank’s most recent project came about when some local agave farmers approached him in finding a way for them to remain agave farmers at a time when the pressure to grow barley for beer companies was strong.
Bank carefully considered what alternative he could develop to help preserve their traditional practices and culture. The mass production of Blue Agave for tequila led to an explosion of monoculture agave farms in Mexico and the severe depletion of water resources, regional biodiversity, and bat pollinators. Bank is working on a more thoughtful approach: “I focus on trying to ensure that families and communities that don’t want to be sucked into commodities have an alternative option,” explains Bank. “I believe there is a multi-generational wisdom in the communities I work with that looks to the past to develop a more sustainable future,” said Bank.
To help him bring his idea to life, Bank partnered with Greg Benson, who he had met through a shared love of podcasts. At the time, Benson was working in the bartending industry in New York City and writing and producing podcasts on food and drinks.
“A couple years ago, Lou pitched me the idea of helping agave farmers who had been doing it for generations and were getting offers from multinational corporations to plant barley instead,” remembered Benson.
After ruminating on what agave product would be best to introduce to an American market, Bank and Benson thought that agave syrup may be the most accessible. Many people in the US were already familiar with industrial agave syrup, typically made from monoculture agave farms and industrialized processing methods. But Benson had his hesitations about jumping in on the agave syrup project.
“I thought, I've had agave syrup from the grocery store, how different can it possibly be? Then, I had a chance to try this kind and saw how different it can be,” said Benson. “It was like the first time I tried real Vermont maple syrup or a real yellow heirloom tomato. It reminded me of a time I was in Honduras when I was 16 years old and bought bananas from a roadside vendor. They were dinky-looking bananas. And I ate half of the bunch because they were amazing. I thought to myself: this is how food is supposed to be.”
With Benson on board, the Ancestral Agave Syrup project was born. Bank and Benson know each agave farmer they work with to help produce the agave syrup, which they showcase on their website to tell the story of how the syrup is made. Agave growers work to promote biodiversity, use traditional farming methods, and deliver on a richer, more flavorful agave product.
Ancestral Agave Syrup is made by slowly cooking down the sap that comes from the heart of the agave, called aguamiel, over a fire stove until it reaches a syrup consistency, a process that can take up to six hours. The syrup is a dark, rich color and thick consistency, similar to molasses. It can be used to sweeten cocktails and beverages, poured over pancakes, waffles, oatmeal, and amaranth porridge, and added to baked goods.
Because every batch is carefully crafted by families growing different types of agaves, each one is unique. The current batch of Ancestral Agave Syrup found online is grown and crafted by agave grower Miguel Ángel Alemán Torres. The taste is very distinct — slightly earthy and sweet, reminiscent of date syrup but with a more complex flavor.
Bank’s credits the strong partnership with rural Mexican families for developing an agave product that can help preserve their traditional ways while also bringing in a revenue stream. “If we have more robust conversations with these communities and their different approaches,” said Bank, “we can come up with more robust solutions.”
Arizona Alliance for Climate-Smart Foods
Exploring and promoting the future uses of agave is particularly important for Arizona, as the state grapples with more extreme weather highs and lows, extended drought conditions, and less available sources of water for food and fiber production. As part of a USDA Climate-Smart Commodity Grant project, a group of partners are forming a collaborative pathway to support producers in growing more desert-adapted crops and finding markets for them.
The Arizona Alliance for Climate-Smart Foods will work with farmers to identify crops and varieties adapted to current and future climate conditions, select desert-adapted seeds and starts, and trial climate-smart practices such as alley cropping, using conservation cover, multi-story cropping, agrivoltaics, and reduced/ no-till. The farmer will receive support for scaling and marketing to spread awareness of the desert-adapted foods that they are growing.
The project consists of providing financial support to participating farmers to offset the cost of changing planting practices and to help support marketing the crop products. The farmer must grow at least one of the agreed-upon climate-smart crops and use at least one of the agreed-upon climate-smart practices. Grant partners will work with the farmer partners to measure how well the plants are doing and the amount of water being used to irrigate the crops.
Arizona farmers can reach out to learn more about the program or submit an application to get involved in the project.
To Learn More & Get Involved:
Apply here to participate in the Arizona Alliance for Climate-Smart Foods
Learn more about the Arizona Alliance for Climate-Smart Foods
Purchase Ancestral Agave Syrup (wholesale prices also available)
Read: Revitalizing Oaxaca Ecosystems in the Face of the Mezcal Bloom
Watch: Discover the Making of Mexican Agave Sugar
Watch: Félix Hernández Ruiz: Pulque or Mezcal?
Listen: This Car Runs on Mezcal - Agave as Biofuel