The Tocayo cocktail at Mírate, a Mexican restaurant and bar in Los Angeles, is a conversation-starter in a glass. From the mole base to the garnish—a whole cricket, glossy and golden, perched on a big rock—the drink always elicits a reaction. But if there’s one ingredient bartender Max Reis hopes will spark curiosity among his guests, it’s his proprietary “nogave” syrup, which he calls his “sustainable answer to agave.” The Tocayo features a generous splash of the stuff, which is made with Demerara sugar and orange blossom honey to mimic the rich, round sweetness of the real thing.
Reis may have been one of the first to coin the term “nogave,” but he’s not alone in his critique of agave ethics. Over the last several years, the beverage industry has opened its eyes to the perils of mass-produced agave spirits, shaken awake by the recent tequila shortage that stirred growers and fraternity presidents alike into a state of panic. The world’s thirst for tequila is so strong today that just about every celebrity, from George Clooney to Kendall Jenner, has their own brand, competing for a piece of the still-growing multibillion-dollar tequila market. But keeping up with demand has proven problematic on all sides.
Agaves are large succulents native to the deserts of the Americas, where they flourish with the help of the long-nosed bat, a key pollinator. Compared with other industrial cash crops like corn, the blue agave plants used for tequila are slow-growing and take at least seven years to reach full maturity. Under pressure to meet their quotas, agave farmers across Mexico have taken to harvesting more underage agave plants before they flower, stripping bats of an important food source and wild agaves of one of the only ways they can reproduce. In a healthy ecosystem, bats spread diverse and resilient genes from plant to plant. But agaves that are cultivated via clonal shoots in large fields, like the vast swaths grown for tequila, are genetically identical, making them more susceptible to disease and drought. This leaves growers more vulnerable to big losses, as in the 1990s, when agave farms were devastated by deadly fungal infections.
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Equally disturbing to bartenders like Reis is that immature agaves have far less sugar content, driving up the need for chemical processing and additives when it comes time to make the syrup. He notes that agave syrups and nectars were first introduced in the United States as a healthy alternative to conventional sugar. But today, store-bought agave’s reputation as an all-natural “superfood” is mostly just marketing.
With greater visibility into the agave industry’s problems, the nogave chorus has gotten louder. More bartenders are mixing up their own alternatives, including the winner of Netflix’s inaugural Drink Masters, LP O’Brien, whose riff on a classic Margarita wowed judges in 2022. Garnished with salt foam and a lime Jell-O wedge, the Beyond Glass Ceilings was crafted with two types of tequila and a pineapple nectar nogave syrup.
“The goal in that moment was really to bring awareness ... to an element of a Margarita that not many people think about,” says O’Brien.
When she first broke into the industry, O’Brien, like so many other burgeoning bartenders, was trained to make Margaritas with the standard specs: tequila, agave syrup and lime juice. It’s a template that was popularized in the ’90s by Julio Bermejo, creator of the Tommy’s Margarita, which substitutes agave sweetener for orange liqueur. But now that she’s more established, O’Brien steers clear of agave syrups. For sustainability reasons, sure—but also because she just doesn’t like the flavor.
“When making an exceptional cocktail, the goal for me is to highlight the base spirit,” she says. The highly processed agave gloop on the market today detracts from “the premium quality and work” that goes into a craft tequila, O’Brien adds. Her pineapple nectar nogave syrup, on the other hand—made with cooked chunks of the fruit and a blend of other sweeteners—uses all-natural ingredients that are more complementary.
On the production side, there’s a slow-growing effort to curb the exploitation of agave plants in Mexico. The Tequila Interchange Project created a “Bat Friendly” certification program, which stipulates that 5 percent of the agaves used in a brand’s production must be allowed to fully mature and flower. Podcaster Lou Bank also founded SACRED (Saving Agave for Culture, Recreation, Education, and Development), which raises money to support rural agave-growing communities in Mexico, according to the nonprofit’s website.
Bank emphasizes that while most agave syrups available in the States are highly processed, it would be a mistake to write off the entire category—especially as a handful of smaller, family-run specialty growers have entered the market, in part through a program piloted by SACRED. In the Mexican state of Hidalgo, the nonprofit is working to support families producing pulque, a milky agave spirit that predates tequila, and to develop a syrup made from the plants in those small-batch operations. “Every batch is unique and delicious and real and true to the heritage of these communities,” Bank says. “So suggesting that all agave syrup is industrial is throwing up another roadblock to these pulque families, who already have a hard time maintaining their cultural heritage.”
There’s also a growing number of distillers looking to produce agave spirits outside of Mexico, which may alleviate some of the burden on Mexico’s deserts. (Though, like Scotch in Scotland or bourbon in the U.S., Mexican law stipulates that tequila can only be produced in the state of Jalisco and select other Mexican municipalities.) Low-water succulents like agave are attractive in places like California, where the agriculture industry uses 40 percent of the state’s already tight water supply. To that end, Pedro Wolfe, an editor at Tequila Raiders, said the California Agave Council is one of the biggest groups investing in domestic agave production. And although “they’re still years away from actually distilling spirits,” they’re growing agave now in hopes that they can enter the market within the next decade.
We may be a ways out from a full-fledged nogave revolution, but the sap of change is flowing. Every time a customer stumbles over “nogave” on the Mírate menu, Reis takes the opportunity to educate—though he keeps the syrup talk “short and sweet.”
“It’s bad for the guests and bad for the environment,” he summarizes. “So we created our own.”
