Sin Gusano has been certified 'carbon neutral'

Climate change is THE great threat of our times.

Well, there’s also unbridled capitalism. I suppose there’s also the rise of populist leaders and nationalist politicians… a potential nuclear war… the age of artificial intelligence… the loss of personal freedoms and self-determination. Oh yes, and a deadly global pandemic.

We can all agree that climate change is a SIGNIFICANT threat of our times. The good news is that, as with all of these other problems, we can reverse its effects through the choices we make.

Our approach to artisanal mezcal is rooted in the understanding that it is a product at odds with the modern world and its modern problems. It is an ancient, hand-made product that was not designed for today's consumer culture. From the beginning, our main challenge has been to walk that fine line between being able to make a project that is financially viable, while also being able to be faithful to agave distillates and their cultural heritage, in their small-batch form, with diverse and specific locations.

But that challenge is exactly the point. Taking it on is the reason I, personally, left behind a much more secure career in the financial world. We believe that these spirits, in their cultural context, have something to teach us about the failings of the modern world, and about how to appreciate diversity and nature. For us, mezcal is not a product that should be adulterated and packaged to fit a dysfunctional consumerist market that is made to have everything arrive the next day and at a discount.  

We believe that if more people understand these agave spirits for their cultural heritage, the world can become a better place. That's why we go the extra mile (thousands of extra kilometers) to find new and exciting spirits that are sometimes untested outside the community where they were made. That's why we release limited quantities and why our product range changes literally every month. It's also why we started a new club, Mezcal Appreciation Society , to have a deeper and more dynamic conversation. It's why we are a company that shares its profits and helps fund other projects with a similar worldview and shared purposes.

But going all those miles in the name of discovery and showing the cultural diversity that mezcal truly encompasses means something else… more carbon dioxide emissions. That’s why we’ve taken it upon ourselves to analyze exactly how much carbon emissions this project emits and offset it by purchasing carbon credits.

Now, we are skeptics by nature, and we understand that the carbon offset system is not perfect. Carbon is still in the atmosphere, and until that stops, we still have a problem. For their part, the projects that create carbon offsets are certified by official bodies that confirm that their activity does reduce the carbon footprint. Buying those offsets (effectively imposing a tax on us) is helping to fund environmental initiatives that are currently losing money and that the world is going to need if we are to reverse climate change.

Now that we've measured our carbon footprint (7 tons last fiscal year by the way...which is literally a drop in the ocean of global carbon emissions) and have a clearer understanding of where those emissions are coming from, we can build policies and practices to reduce them year over year, which is what we're committed to.

Our analysis and offsetting was done by My Carbon . In the following links , you can find our complete emissions report , with links to studies, and our carbon neutrality certification , with a link to the withdrawal of our credits on the UN offset platform (which means that we cannot sell them).

Until May 18, 2021, our bottles of agave spirits are officially a carbon neutral product - perhaps a first in the world?

We'll toast to that!

Thank you for reading, and for your conscious purchases.

Jon- Founder of the Project