A mezcal brand built on reverence, and the film that proves why it matters.
Secretos del Mezcal is both a direct-trade mezcal brand and a documentary of the same name — Episode One of the Secretos de la Tierra series. One thesis, executed across two formats: the brand closes the distance between drinker and producer, and the film builds the audience who will care.
Maestro Mezcalero, on camera in Secretos del Mezcal
00 — The Mission
This may be one of the last generations that still gets to call this a living tradition.
01
The Inheritance
Every maestro in this film learned by hand, from someone who learned by hand. That chain has survived droughts, revolutions, and a hundred years of quiet neglect. It has never had to survive what's coming next — a market growing faster than the plant, and families who can be priced out of their own tradition inside a single generation.
02
The Intervention
We think that chain is still savable. We don't think it gets saved by a byline about it — it gets saved by a business model that makes preservation the thing that pays, not the thing that's subsidized by everything else.
03
The Category Thesis
That's the bet underneath Secretos del Mezcal: as direct-to-consumer becomes the default way mezcal reaches the world, the brand that already has the family relationships, the producer terms, and the audience isn't one option among many. It's the shape the category ends up taking.
How the mission becomes operational
Living Lineage
The maestro families in this film aren't preserving a craft — they are the craft. When one stops, the knowledge doesn't pass to the next generation. It disappears with them.
The Model, Not a Margin
Every layer removed between the field and the glass is margin returned to the people keeping this alive. As membership grows, that isn't overhead spent — it's more producer families brought onto direct terms, and more of their communities reached.
Reforestation Commitment
A percentage of every sale is committed to reforesting agave land depleted by overharvest — replanting the wild stands that the industry's own growth has put under the most pressure.
01 — The Opportunity
Growth that looks like success from outside, and an emergency from inside the valley.
Mezcal's global rise is real. So is the structural crisis underneath it — one that no existing brand is built to solve from the inside.
$1.3B
Projected global market, 2028
700%
Export growth over the last decade
200+
Agave species, many endangered
3
Generations of knowledge lost per retiring maestro
Wild agave populations are collapsing under commercial harvest pressure. Artisanal families earn a fraction of what their mezcal sells for abroad. Most “craft” brands still route through importers, distributors, and retailers — each layer extracting margin and diluting the story. The consumer paying $180 a bottle has no relationship with the family who made it. That gap — a direct relationship between drinker and tradition — is what Secretos del Mezcal is built to close.
02 — Two Ventures, One Mission
The brand funds the mission. The documentary builds the audience.
Investors own equity in a single holding company that operates both. Each is designed to reinforce the other.
The Brand
Secretos del Mezcal
The Membership Brand
A direct-to-consumer mezcal brand. Quarterly bottle shipments and a member community built around education, access, and a living relationship with the families who produce the mezcal. No importers, no distributors, no retail markup.
A 35-minute documentary carrying the brand's own name, deliberately. Follows the mezcal families of Oaxaca preserving a living tradition as global demand threatens to hollow it out. No brand, logo, or product ever appears on screen.
The Documentary Builds the Audience → The Brand Converts It to Community → The Community Funds Episode Two → Episode Two Builds a Larger Audience
03 — The Brand
Every bottle arrives with the full story of the family who made it.
Not as marketing copy. As a genuine relationship, structured so the producer always earns more from a bottle than the company does.
Model
Membership, two tiers — quarterly shipment (4 bottles/year, one rotating producer family per shipment) or bottle allocation (4 bottles/year, member-selected from the season's roster). Every bottle ships with a provenance card: the mezcalero's name, the maguey species and age at harvest, the village and method.
Logistics
Own importation eliminates the 25–40% margin a third-party importer typically takes. A bonded storage facility in Downtown Tijuana handles U.S. customs. Bottling and provenance ticketing happen in Oaxaca before shipment. Distribution cost is secured at $1 per bottle.
Retail License
Amar Harrag is the principal partner of Tahona Mercado, an agave-specialized bottle shop in National City, California. That business holds the retail license the brand operates under to sell mezcal directly to consumers — the Company isn't waiting on a license to be secured; it already has one, through an existing, operating partner business.
Producer Terms
Founding relationships with mezcalero families built over a decade through Tahona Bar and Mezcal Baja Fest — partnerships, not supplier contracts, with terms protecting the families' knowledge, methods, and right to refuse orders that compromise their practice.
Why It Holds
A member who understands what they're buying — and that their membership directly supports the families behind it — doesn't churn. They become an ambassador.
Reforestation
A percentage of every sale funds reforestation of agave land depleted by overharvest. As the membership scales, so does the acreage being replanted.
04 — The Documentary
An honest account of what the mezcal world is living through.
Episode One of Secretos de la Tierra — “Secrets of the Earth” — a series entering the world of one sacred plant at a time. The documentary shares its name with the brand on purpose; each future episode will carry its own plant's name in turn.
35 minutes, observational documentary — directed by Akira Chan & Renee Airya of Rare Media.
Covers
The biological and cosmological lifecycle of the maguey. The ceremonies and spiritual practices around traditional production. The economic reality facing artisanal families — the price paradox, wild agave depletion, the generational rupture. What a traditional mezcal is, and what the market is turning it into.
Targets
Festival premiere at Sundance or IDFA. Platform conversations with Apple TV+, Netflix, MUBI, and Neon. Co-production interest from Arte and PBS.
Licensing Range
A single-episode license for a documentary of this scale typically runs $250K–$1.5M, depending on platform and territory. A six-episode series deal represents a materially larger event.
Sequence 9 — 00:28:03
“We went from being guardians of this to being suppliers of it. That’s not the same thing.”
— Maestro, on the export market's pressure on his family's palenque
05 — Investment Structure
$500,000 for 10% of the holding company. Three founding tiers.
Every tier includes equity, a running bottle allocation, and documentary credit. Higher tiers add production and community access.
Tier 01 — 1 Share
Founding Member
$25,000
Equity in the holding company
Quarterly bottle shipment for life of investment
Named in documentary credits — Founding Supporter
Priority access to future rounds and limited releases
Tier 02 — 2 Shares
Founding Partner
$50,000
All Founding Member benefits
Annual allocation upgrade — 8 bottles/year
Invitation to the annual mezcal experience in Oaxaca
Named in documentary credits — Founding Partner
Tier 03 — 4+ Shares
Co-Producer
$100,000+
All Founding Partner benefits
Named Co-Producer credit, this film and all series episodes
12 bottles/year, including single-harvest reserve allocations
Invitation to premiere and industry screenings
Bottle allocation scales further at $150K+ — 16+ bottles/year with full reserve access.
1,000 members at launch, scaling to 5,000 by Year 3 following the 2027 crowdfunding campaign, on a 30% net margin.
Year 1 — Launch
$1.18M
1,000 members · $354K net margin
Year 2
$2.48M
2,000 members · $744K net margin
Year 3 — Post-Crowdfunding
$6.5M
5,000 members · $1.95M net margin
Of the $200,000 brand launch budget, $150,000 becomes mezcal inventory — spirit purchased directly from producer families at fair prices, worth roughly $300,000 at current market value the day it's acquired, and appreciating further as it ages in glass.
Worst Case
Quarterly shipments of premium artisanal mezcal that doesn't exist in retail, from families whose livelihoods the investment directly supports — plus a completed documentary reaching a wide audience. Not a bad outcome for any investment.
Best Case
Two return streams, not one. On the brand: 5,000 members by Year 3 on $6.5M revenue, where a 10% equity share produces roughly $195,000 in annual dividends on $500,000 invested — a return approaching 39% a year. On the documentary: a single-episode license typically runs $250K–$1.5M, where that same 10% share adds a one-time distribution of roughly $25,000–$150,000 the year a deal closes — before a six-episode series deal, which would be larger still. Add any brand acquisition event on top of both. Diageo acquired Casamigos at up to $1B; Bacardi acquired Ilegal Mezcal in 2023 for $130M.
Documentary licensing is a single, non-recurring distribution when a deal closes — it doesn't repeat annually the way membership dividends do, and timing depends on the film's festival and platform reception.
08 — The Team
Twenty years of hospitality, a decade of producer relationships, an award-winning studio.
Amar Harrag
Founder & Creative Director
Founder of AWE Hospitality Group and Tahona Bar — one of the first serious mezcal programs in the American West. Creator of Mezcal Baja Fest, connecting San Diego and Baja California audiences with Oaxacan producers. Main partner of Tahona Mercado, an agave-specialized bottle shop in National City, California — the retail license the brand operates under to sell direct to consumers. Co-founder of Ethos Baja, a wellness retreat in Valle de Guadalupe. Thirteen-plus years of philanthropic and community work in Baja California, and the decade-long producer relationships this brand is built on.
Akira Chan & Renee Airya
Directors, Rare Media
Co-founders of Rare Media, an award-winning Southern California documentary studio. Their prior work — Black Star, Igniting Impact, projects for Chopra Global and Mindvalley — sits at the intersection of social impact, cultural storytelling, and transformational filmmaking, with the cross-border fluency this film needs.
Adrian Grenier
Documentary Narrator
A voice for a living tradition.
Actor, filmmaker, and environmental advocate Adrian Grenier joins Secretos del Mezcal as narrator, bringing audiences into the world of the families, landscapes, and ancestral knowledge behind this extraordinary spirit.
Known for Entourage and The Devil Wears Prada, Grenier is also a co-founder of Lonely Whale, connecting his work in storytelling with a longstanding commitment to environmental awareness.
The full PPM, financials, and producer agreements are available on request.
This page is a summary for qualified recipients. The complete private placement memorandum includes full legal terms, financial projections, and the producer partnership structure.