Mezcal Villasuso

Mezcal Villasuso traces to 1930, when Don Manuel Villasuso Ledezma used family land in the Valley of San Francisco, in San Felipe, Guanajuato, to found his own distillery. The site sits at roughly 1,860 meters elevation in the Jaral de Berrio region of Mexico's high plains.

The distillery's defining production choice is steam-cooking rather than firewood: the brand notes that roughly 80% of mezcals on the market are cooked over wood fires, which impart smoke to the finished spirit, while Villasuso cooks its wild Salmiana agave with steam in 100-year-old, above-ground stone ovens. The agave itself is wild-harvested at 8 to 10 years of age, with individual piñas weighing around 155 pounds; cooking takes three days, after which the cooked agave is crushed using a traditional tahona stone mill.

Four generations of the family have now worked the distillery. Pedro Valdés, the third generation, currently leads production alongside his granddaughter Malena Villasuso and her four children, who the brand says continue to follow the recipe inherited from Don Manuel. The result is marketed as a smokeless mezcal — a point of differentiation within a category where wood-smoke character is often treated as a defining trait, and one the family ties directly to the steam-cooking method established at the distillery's 1930 founding.