A tequila family’s own brand in Oaxaca.

400 Conejos is a mezcal made in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca and owned by the company behind José Cuervo tequila. The Mexican business magazine El CEO reported in June 2023 that the brand belongs to Casa Cuervo, which is in turn held by Becle, the listed company controlled by the Beckmann family. According to El CEO, Casa Cuervo saw the need to enter the mezcal market with a brand of its own, and 400 Conejos was the result.

In the United States the brand is handled by Proximo Spirits, the Beckmann family’s American spirits company in Jersey City, New Jersey. English Wikipedia says Proximo was founded in 2007, lists it as a subsidiary of Becle and includes 400 Conejos among its mezcals, and a Proximo press release of October 2025 describes the company as the owner of 400 Conejos.

The sources give different starting points. El CEO wrote in 2023 that the brand had arrived on the market ten years earlier, while Proximo’s October 2025 release quoted the company as saying the brand had launched six years before. Neither gives an exact date.

The family behind it has a long history with agave spirits. English Wikipedia says the first Vino Mezcal de Tequila de José Cuervo was made in 1795, and that tequila was known as “mezcal de tequila” until 1893, when the word mezcal was dropped from its name. The same article names Juan-Domingo Beckmann as the sixth generation of the family to lead the company, and says Proximo took over the distribution of José Cuervo in the United States in July 2013, after Diageo ended its distribution deal.

Four hundred rabbits, one espadín agave.

The name comes from Aztec belief. English Wikipedia describes the Centzon Tōtōchtin — “Four Hundred Rabbits” in Nahuatl — as a group of deities of pulque, the fermented drink made from the sap of the maguey, tied to the ritual and sometimes dangerous side of drinking; in central Mexican imagery rabbits were also linked to the goddess Mayahuel. Proximo’s October 2025 release tells the story in the brand’s own words: in an ancient Mesoamerican myth, 400 rabbits were the spirits of agave-based drinks, and the number 400 stood for something innumerable or uncountable.

The rabbit is the brand’s mascot. The same release, headlined around the idea of the brand “sprinting forward like its namesake mascot,” describes a mischief-making conejo, Spanish for rabbit, and quotes Lander Otegui, Proximo’s executive vice president of innovation and marketing.

The core spirit is made from espadín agave. Proximo’s brand page says 400 Conejos is crafted from 100% espadín, and the 2025 release says the agaves are grown in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca. Sources name the town differently: the review site Mezcal Reviews lists Tlacolula, while the Mexican trade site The Food Tech and the retailer Sanborns name Santiago Matatlán. The Food Tech names the master mezcaleros as Don Tacho and Joel Santiago and describes the traditional method: agave cooked in conical wood-fired ovens, crushed by a horse-drawn stone mill, fermented in wooden vats and distilled in copper pots.

The range is short. The 2025 release lists a Joven, a Reposado and an Añejo, all from espadín, plus two expressions named after other agaves, Cuishe and Tobalá, at 40% alcohol by volume in the US. Mezcal Reviews says the Añejo is aged in American oak barrels and that the range is marketed mainly for cocktails; Proximo’s brand page features a mezcal drink called Paloma Meets Conejo, garnished with mango slices cut into the shape of rabbit ears.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all mezcal, baijiu and grappa names: Del Maguey, Montelobos, 400 Conejos, Luzhou Laojiao, Fenjiu, Yanghe and Nardini. Spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a bar list.

A spirits brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirit is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A big-company mezcal in a small-batch category.

400 Conejos has grown into one of the largest names in its category, on the company’s own figures. Proximo’s October 2025 release says it is the number one selling mezcal in the United States, citing case-volume data for the 52 weeks to May 2025, and in the world, citing the drinks analysts IWSR for 2024; it also reports a 38% rise in depletions in 2024, citing Impact Databank. The release’s boilerplate calls it the top-selling mezcal brand in Mexico and the US.

Within its owner’s portfolio the brand is one of two mezcals. English Wikipedia lists 400 Conejos and Creyente as Proximo’s mezcal brands, alongside tequilas such as 1800, Gran Centenario and Maestro Dobel, and spirits from other categories such as Kraken rum, Bushmills Irish whiskey and Boodles gin. The same article says the Beckmann family controls both Proximo and the Cuervo business, and traces the family’s descent from José María Guadalupe de Cuervo. Other mezcal brands in this series, such as Montelobos, offer a comparison.

The name needs a little care online: Conejos is also the name of a county in Colorado, unrelated to the mezcal, and the brand’s name is Spanish for “400 rabbits.”

For a design guide, 400 Conejos shows how a mezcal can borrow a figure from Aztec religion — a band of rabbit gods of drink — and turn it into a friendly mascot that sells a traditional Oaxacan spirit far beyond Mexico. Compare José Cuervo, the tequila house under the same family, and Del Maguey, the single-village mezcal brand. For this guide we use agave green, Oaxacan clay and smoke black with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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