Six to ten years before it's ready

Not because of paperwork or aging or supply chains. Because the plant needs somewhere between six and ten years in the ground before it has enough sugar in it to be worth harvesting. There is no fertilizer, no technique, and no amount of capital that changes this.

In a beverage industry that can conceive, formulate and ship a new product in under a year, that number is almost absurd. It’s also the single most important fact about tequila.

What’s actually happening down there

Agave isn’t a cactus. It’s a succulent, and what it’s doing during those years is storing energy.

The plant sends up long spiked leaves — pencas — and slowly builds a dense core called the piña, named for its resemblance to a pineapple. A mature piña can weigh anywhere from 40 to well over 100 pounds. It is, functionally, a battery of complex sugars that the plant has spent the better part of a decade charging.

Left alone, the agave would eventually spend all of that on a single enormous flower stalk called a quiote, reproduce, and die.

Tequila production intercepts that moment. The jimador — the harvester — cuts the quiote before it forms so the sugars stay in the piña, then later strips the leaves away with a flat blade called a coa and pulls the core.

Which means every piña harvested is a plant that spent years preparing for something it never got to do.

Judgment, not a calendar

Here’s the part that gets lost in the six-to-ten-year framing: it isn’t a countdown.

Agave doesn’t ripen on a schedule. Maturity depends on altitude, soil, rainfall, temperature and the individual plant. The highlands of Jalisco produce different agave from the valley floor, on different timelines. A jimador decides when a plant is ready by looking at it — the color of the leaves, the shape of the core, the way it’s grown.

That’s generational knowledge, passed down in families, and there’s no instrument that replaces it. The CRT verifies sugar content before certified production, but the initial call is still made by a person standing in a field.

Why this collides with a boom

Tequila has had an extraordinary run. Demand has climbed year after year, the category has expanded internationally, and the number of registered brands has grown steeply — the CRT’s list now runs to roughly 2,600 entries against around 360 certified producers.

But agave planted in response to a boom arrives six to ten years after the decision to plant it.

The result is a market that has historically swung between shortage and glut. When demand spikes, everyone plants — and the resulting supply lands nearly a decade later, often into conditions that have completely changed. Prices for agave have moved dramatically in both directions over the years for exactly this reason.

The plant, indifferent to all of it, takes as long as it takes.

What it means for a can

We think about this more than you’d expect a seltzer brand to.

The agave in a can of Lumi Sol went into the ground years before we existed as a company. Somebody planted it, somebody watched it, and somebody decided it was ready — and none of those people were thinking about us when they did it.

That’s the argument against shortcuts, and it isn’t an abstract one. Every corner a drink cuts is a decision to not wait for something. Use a malt base instead of tequila, and you’ve skipped the decade. Use a mixto and roughly half of your sugar came from a plant with a growing season measured in months.

There’s no moral failing in any of that. But it is a different product, and it’s built on a different amount of patience.

The agave with a name on it

In September 2019, in a field in Jalisco, our founder planted an agave by hand and it was marked with a small chalkboard plaque with her name and the date on it.

That plant is only now approaching the age where it could become tequila.

We find that clarifying. Everything about launching a brand feels urgent — the timelines, the meetings, the pressure to move. And out in Jalisco there’s a plant with her name on it that has been doing exactly one thing, extremely slowly, the entire time.

#CheckTheCan

Figures reflect CRT registry data current as of 2026.