I saw some threads in which people were condemning use of agave syrup, on the grounds that agave cultivation has deleterious ecological consequences.
I haven't actually checked whether agave cultivation is more destructive than growing potatoes or carrots or anything else on a per calorie basis, and I don't know whether environmental damage per calorie is the best metric, but my curiosity took me in a different direction: how much agave goes to agave syrup, how much goes to tequila, and how much goes to mezcal?
I'd think agave farming associations would have this data -- that they'd be pouring over the data, trying to see if they could market agave-syrup baklavas, wondering whether they could somehow sell people on a double-tequila margarita for Taco Tuesday specials, etc. Maybe they do, but I can't find it.
For the amount of agave syrup, I found this site, ominously called Mordor Intelligence, claiming that the agave syrup market in 2024 was $187.24 million. How much agave is that, though? One Amazon source of bulk agave is $147.58 for 44 lbs. (There are other sources, but they don't differ radically.) This suggests that about 25,322 tonnes of agave syrup were sold in 2024. A USDA source claims that agave syrup is about 68% sugar by weight, the amount of sugar being sold in agave syrup is around 17,219 tonnes. (I have way more significant figures than is justified here, but I'm leaving them in mid-process.)
Mordor Intelligence claims the 2024 tequila market 457.96 million liters. Tequilas are, I've heard, often 80 proof, or 40% alcohol by volume. So a liter of tequila should, in principle, have 400 ml of alcohol, weighing 0.79 g/ml * 400 ml = 316 grams of alcohol. It's generally accepted that fermentation yields about 55% of the starting sugar mass as ethanol. I.e., 1 kg of sugar will give you about 550 grams of ethanol. So each liter of tequila started from 575 grams of agave-sourced sugar.
This suggests that the amount of agave-derived sugar going into tequila is about 263,119 tonnes. Except one thing: a lot of tequila is not pure fermented agave. Up to 49% of tequila can be some other neutral grain spirit. This could potentially cut sugar going into tequila to 134,191 tonnes.
So, back-of-the-envelop, it looks to me like 7-8 times as much agave goes to tequila as to agave syrup, although some tequilas are higher than 80 proof, and contain more than 51% agave sugar, so this is probably something of an underestimate. I also feel there's a lot of uncertainty in the agave syrup quantity estimate -- is the agave syrup market the market for selling agave from farm to processors, or is it final purchases by consumers? I think most consumer agave syrup is bought in smaller batches, at higher per-volume prices, than the four gallon Amazon agave jug, so perhaps total agave sugar in syrup is an overestimate.
What about Mezcal? I tried to figure that out, but I got exhausted, so I'm not sure. The North American market page puts market volume at 19.73 million liters. The global market page puts Mexican exports in 2020 at 4.8 million liters. So is ~15 million liters consumed within Mexico? I don't know if I trust this data. I don't know if I trust a lot of the previous data either. I think it's a significantly smaller market than tequila. if anyone has good data on Mezcal -- or better data than what I have on agave syrup and tequila -- I'd certainly welcome it.
(I'm not going to disingenuously pretend not to understand why some people on Tumblr get super mad about agave syrup rather than condemning Friday night margaritas, but that seems to me like a fairly obvious and uninteresting phenomenon, at least in my current state, so I focused on trying to reverse engineer the allocation of agave from scattered data on final agave products.)
