Mezcal Tasting in Roma Norte: 3 Bars, 5 Agaves & a Cocktail demo

This is a guided Mexican spirits tasting, not a bar crawl and not a drinking game. Across three specialist bars in Roma Norte, you'll taste five carefully selected spirits chosen to teach you something real about Mexican spirits, not just pour them in front of you.

It starts with Los Juertes, a spirit distilled from pulque, one of Mexico's oldest drinks. From there, you choose: sotol, served from a bottle with a coiled snake inside and made from Dasylirion, a plant unrelated to agave despite the resemblance, or a mezcal from Guerrero, for guests who'd rather stay with agave from the start. At Matuche, a bar dedicated entirely to Mexican spirits, you taste three distinct mezcal expressions side by side: Máxima, an ensamble from Puebla; Huaxe, crushed with a stone tahona and fermented with wild yeasts in Oaxaca's Mixteca Alta; and Dr. Montesinos, from Agave durangensis. You'll also compare the same mezcal in a clay jícara and in glass.

For select pours, you taste before you're told what's in your glass, so smell and taste do the work before your eyes do. It's one part of the tasting, not the whole of it: what you're really getting is context, who made each spirit, where it comes from, and why it tastes the way it does. Not every mezcal is intensely smoky, and this selection favors expressions where smoke doesn't dominate the palate, letting agave, fruit, herb, and earth come through.

You'll close at Barra Lupe with a Mezcal Paloma and a proper toast, walking away able to explain what actually separates one Mexican spirit from another, and why mezcal is only part of a much bigger story.