From left, Terese O’Malley, Melissa Beach and Alicia Dee toast while drinking mezcal at Odin in Oakland.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
Odin’s expansive menu book includes vintage bottles, including as far back as 2001.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
Odin opened in Oakland, near Jack London Square, in 2022.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
Alicia Dee enjoys a cocktail at Odin. The bar only serves five standard cocktails.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
Owners Silvia Hernandez, left, and husband Cory McCollow.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
If you start obsessing over agave, you’ll hear about Odin. The Oakland bar is oft spoken of in a reverent whisper. It might be the best mezcal bar in the country right now. The depth of the bottle list at Odin, and its focus on vintages of agave spirits dating back decades, put it in rare company — alongside The Cabinet in New York City, Mírate in Los Angeles and the upstairs bar at Whisler’s in Austin, Texas.
And it turns out I am obsessed with agave. It wasn’t always this way; I’ve spent the last 20 years, give or take, writing professionally about drinks: coffee, wine, cocktails, mineral water, tea, nonalcoholic beer, fancy restaurant sodas. I was always awareof agave spirits — tequila, of course, and also mezcal and its many variants — but I had filed them away as the stuff of cocktails, like the legendary Oaxaca old fashioned created by Phil Ward at the original Death & Co. location in lower Manhattan in 2007.
There’s a hoary wine cliché about how “all roads lead to Burgundy.” It’s the belief that no matter what you’re into — goofy orange wine or whatever — eventually, someone is going to pour you a glass of Premier Cru Burgundy and nuke your palate from space. This is sort of what happened to me with agave. The easiest way to explain it is that agave spirits are like cocktails unto themselves: They’re so complex that you taste multiple overlapping things in a single sip, a profound intricacy and riotous multiplicity of flavors. But they’re also like wine, in that they taste positively alive in the bottle.
Article continues below this ad
AnnaMarie Alves makes a cocktail at Odin.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
At the same time, the small production, artisan nature of mezcal and many agave subcategories, wherein batch sizes and idiosyncratic bottle releases can number in the mere dozens, scratches the same deep, extremely online itch for me as sneaker drops or whatever other totem of supposed scarcity and desirability that’s come to define rarefied consumer appreciation in the 21st century.
Spirits like scotch and bourbon acquire flavor and value from the years they spend in a barrel. For agave, it’s the years that the plant — technically a succulent, and taxonomically a member of the asparagus family — spends in the ground, soaking up the sun and the soil and the nutrients, creating layers of flavor in the finished product. Agave spirits have deep roots in Mexico: wild-grown agave has been fermented and drunk across Mexico for thousands of years, and this tradition collided with Spanish copper stills and the distillation practices of enslaved Filipino workers beginning in the 16th century. Regional styles and techniques have iterated upon themselves now for generations, arriving at a modern milieu of mastery and flavor obsession you find across Mexican culture today, with master distillers preserving tradition while pushing boundaries of flavor, technique and attention to detail.
San Francisco Chronicle Logo
Make us a Preferred Source to get more of our news when you search.
Add Preferred Source
Odin, which describes itself as a “mezcalería con propósito” (“a mezcal bar with purpose”), is dedicated to the breadth and depth of agave spirits from across Mexico, including tequila, mezcal, sotol, raicilla, bacanora and unclassified “destilados de agave” that originate in more than a dozen states, from Sonora in the north to Oaxaca, the beating heart of Mexico’s distillation tradition.
Article continues below this ad
Odin’s vast agave collection includes rare bottles and older vintages that are rarely seen in the U.S.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
More than 450 individual bottles of agave are available as pours here, which makes Odin one of the most stocked bars in America in terms of agave-by-the-glass. They’re cataloged in the pages of a list that feels more like a wine book from San Francisco’s Michelin-starred Saison or Lazy Bear than any other spirits menu I could reference. While anyone can buy a lot of bottles, not anyone can build a collection like the one that Odin’s owners, Silvia Hernandez and husband Cory McCollow, have over the past 15 years. (The pair also ran the Mexican restaurant Nido, which they closed during the pandemic and later turned into Odin, and operate Nido’s Backyard nearby.) The mezcal specialist and educator Hugo Gonzalez helped develop the program, which is now overseen by Eric Martin, part of the team at Odin since 2024. “We try to approach things like we’re one of those spots with a huge wine collection,” Martin said, “except here everything is by the glass.”
Much of what’s in that mezcal book includes vintage bottles, including as far back as 2001. While scotch fiends have long sought out 20-year-old expressions and bourbon fans are known for hunting down dusty bottles, it’s far less common to have access to older issuances of agave — which now outsells whiskey, rum and vodka in the United States. Local stores like San Francisco Tequila Shop in Bernal Heights and Prizefighter in Emeryville are at the forefront of this boom, but Odin is pouring back vintage stuff you can’t buy anywhere; McCollow estimates up to 75% of the bar’s collection is unavailable for retail purchase. Earlier I mentioned the wine lists at Saison or Lazy Bear, but for agave lovers this place is more like drinking at La Tour d’Argent in Paris, where historic vintage bottles are opened each night.
McCollow looks for a bottle of mezcal on the back bar. He estimates up to 75% of Odin’s collection is unavailable for retail purchase.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
There are no major corporate spirits at Odin — no Casamigos or Jose Cuervo or Patrón or Clase Azul. The bar’s “well” mezcal is an exclusive series of collaboration batches with Maestros del Mezcal, a collective of mezcal producers. Similarly, the well tequila on my last visit was G4, a cultishly revered label from Felipe Camarena, a maestro mezcalaro (the term of respect given to distinguished tequila and mezcal producers). Most bars keep it on the top shelf and trumpet such collaboration bottles as scarce and special. Nearly every pour on Odin’s list, from vintage unobtanium to well drinks and new releases, costs between $10 and $20 an ounce, served neat.
Article continues below this ad
Toward the front of the menu there’s a section for “Mezcales Raros” — what Odin’s team is particularly excited about at the moment, alongside offerings from deep within the treasure cave of the bar’s list. Here’s where you’ll find, for example, a 2017 “Ensamble” from Candido Garcia Cruz in Oaxaca, bottled by Neta, and composed of five distinct agave varieties aged in the bottle. It is something like a demented Bloody Mary, with flavors of cooked tomato, bright green tomatillo and Skittles candy. This blended style is one of my favorite ways to drink agave, because it reminds me of the soft touch and craft you find among winemakers combining distinct grape varietals in the Rhone Valley, or the California “Meritage” blend based on Bordeaux.
Another selection from this section stopped me dead: a 2014 bottle of Cenizo, an uncommon variety of agave that grows best at high altitudes in the state of Durango, distilled by a mezcalero named Melesio Soto Morales and bottled by Mezcaloteca, an independent label from a revered mezcal tasting room in Oaxaca City. There’s a pronounced sweetness to it — orgeat, goat’s milk caramel and pecan pie — offset by shocks of caper brine acidity and the visceral satisfaction of a shiver-inducing, perfectly balanced dirty martini, with an additional layer of complexity from a decade of aging in the bottle. There is nowhere else in America you can drink this.
From left, Cuish Penca Larga, Mezonte Raicilla Japo and NETA Ensamble (Madrecuixe, Espadín, Jabalí) at Odin.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
Agave neophytes at Odin might start with something like the Cuish Penca Larga ($15), distilled by Hermogenes Vazquez in San Luis Amatlán, Oaxaca, which tastes like the first bite of spring strawberries with a mineral water back; or the Mezonte Raicilla Japo ($15), which offers the unmistakable lactic coating quality of yogurt, alongside flavors of grapefruit soda, candied lemon and oolong tea. I gravitated immediately toward the Pal’alma Sonora Bovicornuta ($15), distilled by Ramón Almada in the border state of Sonora. It is fermented in rawhide, lending an additional layer of complexity and a distinct note of grass-fed beef funk. I followed it with a pour from Macurichos, whose maestro mezcalero, Gonzalo Martinez Sernas, has earned a serious following as one of the top young distillers in Mexico today. Odin has several of his bottles, including the Cirial ($15), which is an obscure agave variety that tastes like pie crust, peach Yoplait with fruit at the bottom, and fresh, crisp jicama.
Drinking agave spirits neat can be intimidating at first, which is one reason cocktails loom so large in the American agave space; they’re still the most common way agave spirits are consumed here. “When we set out to open, I wanted no cocktail menu at all,” McCollow said. It was Hernandez who convinced him otherwise. “We can’t have a bar this nice without cocktails,” she told him.
Article continues below this ad
More than 450 bottles of agave are available at Odin.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
A standard set of five cocktails are on permanent rotation here, including a paloma, a margarita, a very good mezcal negroni, and a drink called La Maxima, served with tequila, Mexican orange liqueur, honey and lime. There’s no vodka behind the bar but that is meant to promote the vast set of flavors inherent to agave. No matter what you like to drink, there is probably an agave version of it at Odin.
They call Odin “a mezcal bar with purpose” for many reasons, I think. On the front cover of the tome-like bar book is a photo of Hernandez’s mother in Nayarit, sticking her tongue out in your general direction. It suggests a duality: playfulness and revelry, tradition and experimentation, old and new ways working in tandem. An agave newbie getting that switch flipped for the first time, a mezcal skeptic finding their head turned, a serious collector moved to tears by the depth of the collection, or just a drinker in search of a good time — purpose is what you make of it at Odin. The whispers are true. This bar is extraordinary on a national level, and the experience you’ll have is only possible here.