Scarcity is the currency at Cantina OK!. The Sydney bar, famous for its love of small-batch agave spirits, has just unveiled six new mezcals from Oaxaca—each made in vanishingly tiny quantities, barely a hundred litres per batch. They’re rustic in spirit, regal in ambition, and destined to disappear fast. To taste them, one has to step inside the pocket-sized bar in Sydney, or hope for a fleeting online drop before the bottles are gone.
From Chance Encounters to a Cult Bar
The story of Cantina OK! began in 2017, almost by accident. A trip to Mexico turned into a quest: back-road journeys across Oaxaca, encounters with mezcaleros working on a handful of plants, and friendships sealed over clay stills and wood fires. The souvenirs were bottles filled any way they could, stashed in suitcases and carried home.
What started as keepsakes grew into a mission. The team returned, year after year, building new ties and deepening old ones, until the ritual of bringing back mezcal became the foundation of a bar. The space remains impossibly small—no seats, just a counter—but the offer is uncompromising. A line-up of singular mezcals and a Margarita that has earned its own following.
The Best Shipment Yet for Cantina Ok!
Cantina OK! sits within Mucho, a hospitality group and creative studio. Its Creative Director, Jeremy Blackmore, calls this the most exciting delivery so far: “These bottles are exceptional, straight from the heart of mezcal country. What makes micro-mezcals so thrilling is that they shift from year to year, from one batch to the next. They can’t be replicated, and that’s their magic.”
Four Families, Six Expressions
The line-up begins with Papalometl, distilled by Erubiel Mota from a rare hybrid agave growing high in the Mixteca Alta. From Mengolí de Morelos come two bottlings by Ageo and Felipe Cortes: Tobaziche, made with the Karwinskii agave, and Cucharilla, crafted from Dasylirion, a plant that resembles agave but isn’t—difficult to source, harder still to distil, and seldom seen beyond Oaxaca. Aberardo Angeles of Santa Catarina Minas contributes Espadín Pechuga de Pollo, made in tiny clay stills and infused during distillation with pineapple, banana, apple, raisins, rice, cinnamon, almonds—and chicken.
Finally, the Aquino family of San Luis Amatlán adds two more. Gilberto Aquino’s Ensamble combines Bicuishe, Coyote, Jabalí and Arroqueño, while Paula Aquino—one of the few women in Oaxaca recognised as a maestro mezcalero—creates her Espadín from agaves cultivated entirely on her own land.
Each bottle carries the weight of place and season. And each is likely to vanish as quickly as it appeared.
Images courtesy Cantina Ok!
