our Story

Morro is a project with shared ownership between families on both sides of the border, Oaxacan and Californian. Our relationship predates the brand but our connection was originally forged over a mutual love of mezcal and Oaxacan culinary culture while working as cooks and bartenders in California. 

Juan Lopez Olivera is our maestro mezcalero and has been making mezcal for over thirty years. Juan’s mezcal has been produced and consumed locally in Yautepec for decades and is now available in the US. Juan produces exclusively with Morro as a member of our team. 

We have deep relationships with two local magueyeros and their families. They are our neighbors and it’s from them we purchase all of the agave used in our production. Together we collaborate on how to implement more robust sustainability initiatives such as biodiversifying our agave and seed sources, reforesting indiginous wild agaves and maintaining habitat for local pollinators.

While we are a single artisanally run palenque and pride ourselves on a consistency of process & quality, exact replication between batches is not only impossible, it’s never our intention. Producing authentic artisanal mezcal is a craft that’s passed down between generations and experimented with along the way. It embraces its natural surroundings in production and allows for environmental conditions such as seasonality, temperature, rainfall and humidity to affect the final nuances of each lot. We embrace this methodology and live by our ethos of sustainably-minded small scale production.