Mezcal Por Siempre returned to Los Angeles on September 19th at its new venue, the LA River Center and Gardens, with more than 50 mezcal projects pouring unlimited tastings for the crowd that showed up. Organized by Madre — which holds the largest mezcal selection in the country — the festival’s stated purpose wasn’t just a tasting event. It was built around honoring the maestras and maestros mezcaleros directly, along with the campesino traditions and communities responsible for passing the knowledge down in the first place.
The detail worth sitting with is who actually showed up to pour. A meaningful share of the visiting mezcaleros don’t normally export their product to the United States at all. Getting a bottle from a small palenque into an American market takes capital, paperwork, and distribution relationships that most family-scale producers simply don’t have, no matter how good the mezcal is or how many generations of technique stand behind it. A one-day festival in Los Angeles doesn’t fix that gap, but it’s one of the few situations where a mezcalero without export infrastructure can put a bottle directly in front of American drinkers and bartenders without a distributor sitting in between.
That gap is also visible in the production numbers. Per COMERCAM’s 2026 report, San Luis Potosí — a state that’s held Denomination of Origin status for years — accounted for just 1.21 percent of all mezcal distilled in 2025. Being legally recognized as a mezcal-producing state and actually having the infrastructure to compete on export volume are two very different things.
A festival isn’t a substitute for that infrastructure. But for one evening a year, it puts the people usually left out of the export math in the room, pouring for themselves.