Excomulgado · Our Story
We were excommunicated
before we began.
A platform built not around a product —
but around the people who make it.
When mezcal production spread through colonial Mexico, it threatened the Spanish Crown's tax revenues from European spirits. The king issued a ban. No one listened. He turned to the Pope. The Church excommunicated anyone who produced — or consumed — mezcal.
They kept distilling anyway.
That spirit — of making something true regardless of who forbids it — is what we named ourselves after. Excomulgado. Excommunicated. From the church, from the establishment, from an industry that has confused volume for value and consistency for quality.
We do things differently. We always have.
"Nobody listened.
Nobody cared.
They kept on
producing."
I came to agave spirits in 2006, standing in a palenque in Oaxaca.
I had been a tequila person. When I saw the clear liquid coming off the still — no barrel, no colour, nothing to hide behind — I couldn't understand where the flavour was coming from. A family friend who had worked in agave spirits since the 1970s walked me through it. He took me to small, old palenques deep in the hills. By the time we left, I understood I had been drinking the wrong thing my whole life.
Twelve years later, I was planning to open a mezcalería in Amsterdam with friends. We were weeks from signing a lease when COVID hit. Project cancelled.
But the maestros I had been visiting — mezcaleros who had welcomed me into their palenques, shared their batches, let me watch and taste and learn — came back to me with a different proposal. They knew my background in international trade. They asked if I could help them export.
In Mexico, selling locally means losing up to 70% of revenue to taxes and levies. Exporting changes everything. So in 2018, Excomulgado was born — not as a brand built around a product, but as a platform built around the people who make it.
Oaxaca.
Amsterdam.
Pivot.
Netherlands.
Some I found through the mountains. Some found me.
Filemón, from Sola de Vega, was among the first — and introduced me to some of the others. But most of the network was built the slow way: driving back roads through the mountains of Oaxaca, stopping at palenques that don't have signs, asking the right questions of the right people. Some came through mezcal lovers. Some through people in the industry who still care about the craft.
Before any bottle is ever filled, I taste the spirit at the source. I visit the palenque. I see how the work is done — that the traditional methods are intact, that waste is managed properly, that there is no large-scale deforestation for firewood, that the families behind the palenque are the ones genuinely benefiting.
We are not interested in palenques built to impress visitors. We look for maestros who would be doing this exactly the same way whether we showed up or not.
"I need to taste
the spirit at
the source."
No contracts.
No volume commitments.
No blending.
No cutting corners.
We buy what the earth produces, when it's ready — not when a spreadsheet demands it. An agave that takes 25 years to mature cannot be rushed. A fermentation driven by wild yeasts and mountain air cannot be standardised.
Every bottle carries what was made, when it was made, by whom. Nothing more. Nothing less. The spirit you drink is the spirit the maestro made — exactly as it left the still.
And every peso we spend stays in Mexico. The bottles, the labels, the carton boxes — all from Mexican family businesses. If Excomulgado is a platform for the maestros, it is a platform for Mexican craft at every step.
"What the earth
is producing —
not what a
contract demands."
We watched tequila become something you drink with lime and salt to kill the taste. We are not letting that happen to agave spirits.
The industry wants contracts, volumes, and consistency. It wants agave spirits to be a category, not a culture. We want the opposite.
Good agave spirits — mezcal, raicilla, and beyond — are closer to wine than to any industrial spirit. They have terroir. They have vintage. Each batch is a place, a person, a season — a specific agave that took between 7 and 25 years to grow, harvested at the right moment, processed with the knowledge of generations. You don't blend those differences away in the name of consistency.
That variation is not a problem to solve. That variation is the product.
"That variation
is not a problem
to solve.
That variation
is the product."
In ten years, the maestros are recognised.
Their names are known.
Excomulgado sits alongside the finest products in the world — in the best restaurants, the wine bars, the whiskey clubs, the dining rooms where people know what they are drinking and why it matters.
And for the everyday drinker who is still learning: we keep teaching. Real agave comes with a real cost. That cost is not a premium — it is an honest reflection of what it takes to grow something for 25 years, harvest it by hand, and distil it with knowledge that took generations to accumulate.
When you cut corners in mezcal, somebody down the chain pays. The environment pays. The mezcalero pays. We are here to make sure that doesn't happen on our watch.
We deliver our grain of sand. The culture survives.
"We won't stop
until all the
maestros are
recognised."