Mezcal’s rise is a breakneck journey unparalleled by any other spirit category in the modern market. As a commercial product, it has only really existed since 1995, when Ron Cooper launched Del Maguey, and it wasn’t until a little over a decade ago that mezcal began to gain a serious foothold in major American cities. In short order, however, the spirit has become a household name and a commercial success, giving way to dozens of new brands. In fact, each time we’ve conducted a survey of the bottles available under $50, the pool of options has changed dramatically; some have moved out of the range, while new brands have stepped in to grab the freed-up market share. 

With this rise come concerns about the future of mezcal, and how it might avoid the commodification that has come to define tequila. Unlike, say, bourbon—which is still mostly produced in Kentucky or Tennessee using the exact same commodity grain distilled via massive, computer-controlled factories—the best mezcal is produced using artisanal, if not ancestral, methods: Agave plants are cooked in pits with hot stones; the hearts are mashed by hand with wooden mallets or a tahona (a large stone wheel); the products are fermented using ambient yeasts, in everything from animal hides to hollowed-out tree trunks; and its distillation vessel, clay or copper, is determined by the mezcal’s place of origin. Preserving these traditions and keeping production and economic success in the hands of mezcaleros should be paramount when choosing a bottle to drink—and was our primary concern in selecting affordable mezcal for this tasting. So, too, was showing the diversity of expressions that even a single variety of agave can render when these artisanal methods are used alongside sound farming practices.

Mezcal can be produced in different climates, from high in the arid plateaus of San Luis Potosí to low in the valleys flanking the city of Oaxaca. Further, unlike tequila, mezcal can be made from dozens of distinct agave varieties, many of them wild. These raw materials that are so expressive and singular when distilled are finite resources—some of them taking more than 30 years to mature—and often cannot be replanted. Even espadín, the most common variety of agave used in the production of mezcal (and the source of most mezcal you will find in the sub-$50 category), takes a minimum of six to seven years to mature. 

All of this results in an extremely diverse set of flavor profiles. Smokiness, which has become a shorthand descriptor for mezcal’s overall flavor profile, does not even begin to capture the range of flavors these distillates can produce, from ester-y tropical notes to the grassy, peppery profiles that define so much of the mezcal made from Agave karwinskii varieties, to the earthy, red-fruited profile of bottlings made from tobalá. Even its signature smokiness exists on a spectrum, expressing itself in myriad ways. 

Mezcal, in short, is not one thing.

Our tasting revealed just that. To assess a selection of 15 bottles, we were joined by Lynnette Marrero, co-founder of Speed Rack and a spirits and cocktail consultant, and Leanne Favre, the head bartender at Leyenda, an agave-focused bar in Brooklyn. The top five vote-getters from the tasting were chosen for their quality, but also for their ability to encourage the drinker to go back again and again as the spirit changes in the glass.