Sin Gusano
Agave Spirits
Various States, Mexico
It's more than a drink
Created by
The Sin Gusano Project
Jon Darby
The Origin Story
A Taste for Quality
The Sin Gusano Project was conceived after an influential initial trip to Mexico in 2016. Disillusioned with a world driven by over-consumption of poor quality products, and the financial system that facilitates it, Jon left a career in financial services behind to travel for some months in Southern Mexico. While developing a taste for the local spirits, Jon became fascinated by their incredible diversity, their heritage production techniques, and their ties to a culture more sustainable and in balance with the natural world than the one he just left behind.
Promoting Diversity & Heritage
Sin Gusano started life as a back-street east London mezcal tasting room and bar. The ambition was to open hearts and minds to the diversity and complexity of these incredible agave spirits, and open cultural conversations to get people thinking beyond the dominant consumer culture of the time. The bar concept is a roaming pop-up, of which there have been three to date in different parts of London, each week the space plays host to different art or music events for the local community. When not popped up, we're on the road in Mexico learning from producers and tasting new spirits. By the time of the 3rd pop-up in late 2019 the Sin Gusano mezcaleria was ready to start selling its house spirits by the bottle.
“Inconsistency is King”
For us, agave spirits are a celebration of diversity and inconsistency. By their very nature no two batches of truly artisan agave spirits can ever be the same. That's fundamentally at odds with the capitalist and consumerist structure of society that thrives on consistency and economies of scale. But the inconsistency and unique attributes of each region, each producer, and each batch, is why we love them. It's why we go the extra mile (many, many extra miles all over Mexico) in search of the unique and special and interesting. It's also a reality that lends itself to a subscription model and why, in early 2020, the project launched the Mezcal Appreciation Society (MAS) subscription club. If you're curious to keep learning and trying something new, MAS is the place to be
The secret sauce
A Look Into the World of the Artisan
The Sin Gusano Project represents the work of incredible artisans all over Mexico. It's all about sharing as much as possible and getting the consumer as close as possible to the place and culture of production. To that end, each of our bottlings has a specific web page built for it that contains all the production specifics, pictures from the distilleries, and even commentary from the producers. These pages are embedded behind QR codes printed on the bottles labels, and all the content is first hand with every batch bought in person by our founder.
The Heart of the Agave Spirit
On our mission to open hearts and minds to the incredible world of agave spirits, we aim to do it as equitably as possible. As the market for mezcal and agave spirits expands, its development is by no means guaranteed to be sustainable or fair on all parties. We choose to operate a 10% profit share programme, which sees part of our sales go to a charity that works with NGO's in Mexico on sustainability programmes within agave growing and distilling communities. The whole enterprise is also certified carbon neutral via offsetting and reduction. Full details about these initiatives can be found online at singusano.com