American spirits crafted in the Mexican tradition
There are over 200 types of agave that grow in North America. California is home to nine native species and subspecies of these succulent plants. Once you start noticing wild agave, you spot them everywhere—in roadway medians, neighborhood gardens, parks and hillsides, the island of Alcatraz.
Gian Nelson is someone who notices wild agave, too. “We’re knocking on people’s door, leaving them messages in their mailboxes, we’re on maps pinning where we see agaves,” says Nelson, founder of Napa-based Jano Spirits, which makes a one-of-a-kind agave spirit from 100% California Agave americana. With Jano, he’s blending his background in wine and spirits and as a Mexican American to make a truly unique spirit from a native California agave.
Nelson sports a beard, glasses and a broad smile. He is an affable conversationalist and grows excited when discussing Jano and the future of agave spirits. He speaks with his hands, the tattoos covering his arms dancing as he talks about his work with the California Agave Council. His enthusiasm is contagious, especially as he describes finding his own identity through Jano.
Born in Zihuatanejo on Mexico’s Pacific coast in 1990, Nelson moved at age 4 to Orange County, California, where he was raised by his mother. He spent summers in Mexico with family and learned about food from his abuelita.
“It was the typical story of standing on the chair watching her make huevos con chorizo. She loved and appreciated food.”
But it wasn’t until he was in his early 20s, fresh out of the U.S. Marine Corps, that Nelson became interested in agriculture and the process by which something is made. In the fall of 2012, he began working at Giracci Vineyards and Farms in Southern California. “For the first time, I really became curious about something,” he says. “Why are we mashing these grapes? What is fermentation? Why do you do this and not that?”
He worked in many capacities at the winery, from growing and harvesting the grapes, to fermenting them into wine, to pouring in the tasting room. He became a certified sommelier in 2014.
In the Marine Corps, Nelson learned that he loved being outside, with people. At the winery, he learned to love and respect the land. He learned patience, how to develop his palate, how to talk to people in a tasting room. He found an outlet for creative expression, how to be a custodian of flavors that came from crops.
In 2016, Nelson moved to Napa. Through a series of events that would become pivotal for the next phase of his life—an invitation to spend harvest in St. Helena helping to press off and put wine in barrels at the Fanucci family’s Charter Oak Winery and reconnecting with an old friend who offered him a couch to crash on during harvest—Nelson was offered a job at what would become Loch & Union Distilling Co. Distiller Colin Baker, the friend with whom Nelson had initially stayed, was opening a distillery in American Canyon and wanted Nelson to be part of the team. Nelson knew this was an opportunity to grow his career, to start something from the ground up. So, he said yes and moved into a house in West Napa with the rest of the Loch & Union team.
He compares the experience of living and working with his colleagues to a live/work start-up in the Bay Area. Not only was Nelson a part of a brain trust where they had constant conversations about what they were doing and where they wanted to go, he also learned practical skills, like building a still. They had ordered a CARL still from Germany, which arrived in pieces—pieces that Nelson needed to assemble. He learned, in detail, about how the whole process of distilling works. “This is why vapor travels,” he recalls about building the still. Things started to click.
And because he had developed a palate through his work with wine, he helped develop Loch & Union’s gin recipe, which won a number of awards, including “California Gin Distillery of the Year” in the 2018 New York International Spirits Competition.
It was while he was working at the distillery that Nelson’s interest in agave spirits blossomed. When a friend got married, a fellow groomsman pulled out a bottle of high-end tequila. The groomsman poured a bit for Nelson and asked for his thoughts. Nelson, who was working as a distiller at Loch & Union at the time, shared his honest opinion:
“This doesn’t feel and taste natural. There’s nothing in the natural world that tastes like vanilla and bubblegum.” The seeds were planted. Nelson wanted to find the purest form of tequila, which led him to mezcal.
To start, he bought a bottle of Del Maguey Vida, which was a gateway to mezcal made with 100% agave by traditional, inherently artisanal, Mexican methods, like roasting the agave piña (the fleshy core of the plant) over fire and fermenting the mash in an open tank. He read every book on mezcal he could get his hands on, including Finding Mezcal by Del Maguey founder Ron Cooper and Chantal Martineau.
He started to wonder if anyone in California was making agave spirits. This led him to Craig Reynolds, director of the California Agave Council and owner of California Agave Ventures. Reynolds has been growing agave in both Mexico and California for over 20 years and invited Nelson to Woodland, California, to harvest a crop of mature plants.
Nelson was thrown right into the process. He put on gloves, grabbed a coa (a bladed tool that resembles a flat, rounded shovel) to cut through the tough, spiny leaves, and freed the piñas. The experience reminded him of working in wine, and he was hooked. The seeds for Jano Spirits were planted.
Though there are only a handful of people making spirits from agaves that are grown in California, all of the plants at the farm where Reynolds grows were claimed. Through Reynolds, Nelson was introduced to the Garcia family, who have been growing agave in Woodland for 25 years. The catch: The Garcias were growing the Agave americana varietal, which hadn’t been used to make a spirit. But Nelson wasn’t deterred. Like he had done with mezcal, he started studying the history of Agave americana and found that it was native to California. Instead of trying to replicate Mexican mezcal, Nelson harvested the century plant from the Garcias’ farm, roasted, fermented and distilled it into an agave spirit.
The first run was a disappointment. The juice didn’t taste right. Something, somewhere in the process, had gone wrong. So Nelson took a step back, thought about everything he had studied, everything that he had learned from wine and distilling, and realized that the problem was the agave’s sugar level—a key component of the whole process. He returned to the Garcias’ farm, this time with a refractometer to check the Brix, or target sugars, of the plants. He found a few with the appropriate amount of sugar for distilling.
“No one was telling us how to do this,” Nelson says. “We had to take two things and make them one, so we checked the sugars. There was not an efficient way of checking these native agaves for sugar levels, which should be 30+, so we had to develop our own way of doing field checks to make sure we could attain a level of sugar necessary for spirit production. We came up with this on our own, out of necessity.”
Those plants turned into Jano Spirits’ first and second batches.
“For me, batch one and batch two were incredible. On the surface, they were these spirits that came from obscure agave that no one has ever made in the United States before. I was really proud of that. We made a 100% U.S.- native agave spirit that was cooked traditionally, made artisanally,” Nelson says.
While Nelson was excited that the spirit tasted good, he was most proud of the way in which he harvested, fermented and distilled the Agave americana and finding his voice in the process.
“I didn’t have any preconceived notion of what it was going to taste like. The ferment smelled funky, and God, it was this wild, rambunctious wash. It came off the still so floral and citrusy and pretty. I was like, ‘Huh. This is me.’ I didn’t care what it tasted like, I just cared about the process. I cared about the whole journey of how we got here, how we persevered through rain and heat. That’s been my biggest thing about all of this. The flavor came from the land, the flavor came from us as custodians of the spirit,” Nelson says.
Nelson officially founded Jano Spirits in 2021 as a side project while he was still working at Loch & Union. As he was getting Jano off the ground, he thought of a trip he had made to Mexico City a few years earlier to see his family.
“I sat with my abuelita, who has been my biggest supporter, and she goes back to somewhere in the house and she brings back these three little sample bottles. They all say ‘mezcal’ and are from different states. I was, like, ‘What’s this?’ My abuelito used to travel around Mexico as a civil engineer. He was building roads and bridges on the Pan-American Highway through Oaxaca and was traveling around Mexico. His mementos would be to buy mezcal from all the farmers along the way. He passed away when I was 3. My abuelita goes, ‘These are yours now.’ It meant so much to me because now I feel like I’m having a drink with Abuelito.”
In 2025, he left the distillery to focus on Jano and his work as a board member of the California Agave Council, whose mission is to ensure a sustainable and thriving future for California’s agave growers and processors through advocacy, collaboration and industry development. Currently, Nelson is focusing on the backend of the process and thinking about how the land can support the growth of California agave plants, something that will allow him to go from making 20 cases of Jano a year to 200. And he’s excited about what’s to come.
“I don’t have to buy a spirit that is Mexican,” he says. “I can buy a spirit here that has the same DNA as me.”
MAKING AGAVE SPIRITS
- A refractometer is used to check the Brix of the plants.
- Agaves are harvested with a logging cable attached to a backhoe.
- Pencas are removed with a coa tool, leaving the agave piña.
- Jano Spirits partner Brian Mascia splits piñas into quarters for roasting.
- Earthen pits are lined with local stone and lava rock, then fueled with nut wood, barrel staves and grape vines. When the fire is hot, lava rock covers the fuel.
- Piñas are mounded over the hot lava rocks. Welding blankets cover the piñas, then dirt is shoveled over the top. The piñas roast underground for 5 days.
- The roasted piñas are run through a hammer mill wood chipper, yielding a smoky, fibrous mash to which hot water is added.
- The fibers are pressed, yielding a citrusy-smelling liquid. The liquid is fermented for two weeks in open top vats, then six weeks in steel tanks to mellow the flavors.
- The spirits are double distilled in copper pots, yielding about 20 cases per batch.
