An agave primer
COA, and how to read it
COA sits a few doors down from Bar Leone on Shin Hing Street and has been arguing - successfully and at length - that agave spirits deserve the same connoisseurship that single malts and small-batch bourbons receive. Jay Khan opened the bar in 2017. It has been on Asia's 50 Best almost continuously since. The bar's working menu lists more than two hundred mezcals, tequilas, raicillas, sotols, bacanoras, and other agave-and-agave-adjacent distillates. The first-time visitor needs a small vocabulary to make sense of the place.
Espadínagave angustifolia
The most widely cultivated agave for mezcal, native to Oaxaca. Around 90% of commercial mezcal is espadín; start any agave flight here because espadín is the baseline against which the wild agaves are judged. COA has more than thirty espadín mezcals on the list.
Tobaláagave potatorum
Wild agave, takes around fifteen years to mature, harvested from the high slopes of the Sierra Mixteca. The most floral and least smoky of the common wild agaves; the contrast with espadín is the lesson of any first mezcal flight.
Tepextateagave marmorata
Wild, slow-growing, harvested from cliff faces in the Sierra Sur. Tastes deeply vegetal — cucumber, green pepper, mineral. The agave most likely to stop a conversation at the bar.
Raicillaagave maximiliana / lechuguilla
A spirit from western Jalisco, technically distinct from mezcal under Mexican appellation law but made by similar processes. Funkier, more rustic, often unfiltered. COA stocks raicilla from several small producers that almost never leave Mexico.
Sotoldasylirion (not agave)
Made from the desert spoon plant in Chihuahua and Coahuila - technically not an agave at all, but treated as part of the family by everyone except the botanists. Herbaceous, savoury, often very dry. Drink it after a tobalá to taste the difference.
Bacanoraagave pacifica
A spirit from Sonora, illegal until 1992 (when Mexico finally re-legalised the regional distillation), produced in small quantities by family operations. Lighter, fruitier than most mezcals. The closing pour of a serious agave flight at COA.
The order to drink them in is the order they appear above. The bar will sell you a flight (around HK$450 for four pours) or build one verbally based on what you want to learn. The bartenders are unusually patient about the educational side; this is the bar where Hong Kong's spirits enthusiasts come to learn, and the team takes the role seriously.
