As the gin category expands and matures, more consumers are looking for unique expressions that evoke a strong sense of place. Perhaps it should be no surprise then that Mexico—a country that ranks highly for biodiversity—should be a hotbed for innovations in gin.
Using traditional methods and local ingredients that honor local traditions, Mexican gin distillers are carving out a unique market niche for themselves. Working closely with native plants and the people who grow them, they are creating gins that represent a new way to elevate and preserve a part of Mexican heritage.
Photo courtesy of Acrónimo Spirits
With Sotol and Soul
In Chihuahua, Acrónimo Spirits is a woman-run distillery that makes both gin and sotol—a local spirit made from the region’s desert succulents. CEO Alessandra Camino Creel (pictured above) says her brother is the gin lover in the family, but it was a bartender at her family’s boutique hotel who first gave her the idea to make a gin finished with sotol.
Camino Creel wanted to create a rounded, layered spirit; after some testing, she decided that blending in 17 percent sotol would be the right amount for the finish. They distill the sotol from wild-grown and -harvested Dasylirion wheeleri, a hardy plant in the asparagus family that grows in the Chihuahuan desert. It adds an earthy, smoky note for a distinctive gin, which includes juniper berries from the nearby Sierra Tarahumara mountains as well as lavender, citrus peels, cardamom, and pepper.
When Camino Creel was first making the gin, she would buy citrus peels from juice makers on the street. While that worked well for very small batches, it wasn’t viable as the brand grew. “Any product evolves in time,” she says. After 14 days of maceration, she distills the infused liquid in a copper pot still that’s traditional for sotol.
In the future, Camino Creel says she’d like to make a spirit from apples because her family grows them and because Chihuahua is Mexico’s largest apple-growing region. She says the goal with her spirits is to “take a piece of Chihuahua to the rest of the world.”
“The Pure Aroma of the Village”
Xaime Niembro, founder and manager of Gracias a Dios (GAD) Mezcal and Agave Gin, also is shaping a unique gin profile using Mexican botanicals.
Niembro says it took a few years of testing and tweaking to arrive at the right combination of botanicals.
“The original recipe was with star anise and vanilla from Veracruz, which we removed because it was causing sweet flavors,” he says. They distill the gin from an agave Espadín base and include various botanicals from Oaxaca, including citrus, hibiscus flowers, rosemary, and cacao. “In my opinion, it is just meant to be [in] a negroni,” Niembro says.
Meanwhile, maestro mezcalero Gonzalo Martinez Sernas makes gin from an array of botanicals sourced from the Oaxacan district of Tlacolula. Some come from his own family farm and others from a neighboring farm, both within the village of Santiago Matatlán; he also sources certain herbs from local farmers in the mountains outside of town. The botanicals include the peppery herb hoja santa, basil, guava, orange peel, lime peel, and eucalyptus.
Sernas describes the resulting blend as “the pure aroma of the village.”
Photo courtesy of Condesa Gin
Connections with Mexican Tradition
Jordi Nieto, cofounder of Condesa Gin, says the brand’s recently released Sahumerio gin celebrates Mexican heritage, featuring ingredients such as copal bark and marigold flowers.
“Copal resin has been a cornerstone of Mexican rituals for centuries,” Nieto says, “burned as incense during ceremonies like the Day of the Dead to honor ancestors and guide spirits to the realm beyond our own. Aztec marigold flowers, vibrant and aromatic, symbolize life and death and are used to decorate altars in these celebrations.”
The company donates 1 percent of global sales to Reforestamos México, dedicated to preserving and restoring forests, “but also [to] keeping cities greener, one of the things we love about Mexico City,” Nieto says.
Plus, the whole Condesa staff comes together once a year for a tree-planting day with the Reforestamos team. It’s a chance to step away from desks and connect with nature. “This day has organically become a time for us to unite as a company and celebrate a cause we all care about,” Nieto says.
Nieto describes his Xoconostle y Azahar gin—xoconostle is a local type of prickly pear, while azahar is orange blossom—as “brighter and fun,” ideal for a spritz or gin and tonic. Pickers carefully harvest the prickly pear during its short growing season, and master distiller Hillhamn Salome hand-selects the fruit to ensure the correct ripeness.
“The fruit is then sliced by hand and dried in the sun to get the right flavor and aroma,” Nieto says. Once dried, it macerates in the gin with the rest of the botanicals.
The Condesa Gin Clásica’s botanicals include sage, jasmine, lavender, and fragrant palo santo wood. Nieto recommends enjoying it in a classic martini, as the wood’s resinous aspect provides unique, elegant notes.
Photo courtesy of Taller Astrafilia
Kernels of Creativity
In Mexico City, Taller Astrafilia is a distillery run by partners Heráclito López and Andrés Rubio Isunza, who aim to celebrate Mexican flavors and traditions with their spirits.
Mexico is the cradle of maize—where indigenous people began domesticating it many millennia ago—and Taller Astrafilia makes its base spirit from heirloom corn grown in the southern state of Chiapas, where Isunza grew up.
“It’s a very interesting base,” he says. “It’s not that neutral; it has a character.” He describes it as slightly sweet, evocative of the humidity after rain.
He says they build on this 100 percent corn base to create four different profiles for their Granicera gins, adjusting different botanicals to emphasize citrus, flowers, spices, or herbs. To select those botanicals, the team traveled around Mexico to learn about plants and the potential flavors that they could contribute, settling on those from regions such as Atlixco, Ozumba, and Tabasco. Isunza says he found the experience hugely fulfilling. (Some of his favorite botanicals include hoja santa and avocado leaf.)
As Isunza began to work with farmers, he looked for fields that had the healthy sounds of life: the hums and buzzes of insects. “We started to ask them for little spaces of the field, just for us,” he says. That helped the team to ensure high-quality ingredients. The botanicals used in Granicera gins are shade-dried to preserve flavor, then macerated in the corn spirit for a month before being double-distilled in copper stills.
Isunza says that cocktail bars are an important proving ground for new, innovative gins, and head bartenders at leading bars are critical for brands such as theirs. “It’s a natural connection,” he says, adding that the distillery also supplies their own bitters to highly regarded bars.
By making bitters and liqueurs alongside those gins, Astrafilia is creating a portfolio that can help bartenders and consumers make cocktails from entirely Mexican ingredients.
“Gin has a lot of possibilities,” Isunza says. “We’re proud of the space in the market that we are taking.”