While aficionados tend to prefer blanco tequilas, and imbibers of dark spirits usually gravitate towards añejos, the reposado category is often overlooked. But these light-to-medium aged tequilas offer incredible diversity. They often pair well with food, or serve as the perfect end of the night sipper. So, we gave 10 repos (both newer products and established ones) to members of our tasting panel in a blind taste test to gather their thoughts. We carefully selected products with a wide range of aromas and flavors, and of course, all needed to be additive free. As the high scores suggest, all ..read more

On the heels of Additive-Free Week, we can’t help but be bowled over by the success of our Confirmed Additive Free program. There are so many brands and advocates that have made this a real movement, and we are so grateful for your involvement. We always believed that this was a mission bigger than us – it’s about the producers who are committed to making tequila in a natural way, and the consumers who appreciate their efforts. It’s about being able to chose what you want to drink, based on transparent labeling. Over the last few months we’ve traveled across the U.S., giving tastings and trai ..read more

Update: This project continues! You can follow our progress in the “Lotecito Log“. In this strange pandemic year asking adults what they did during quarantine has become as common as asking kids what they did during summer vacation. While most of North America was in peak sourdough bread making, we decided to tackle a different kind of project. Since we live in the Mexican state of Jalisco, have tequila industry friends, and an endless curiosity about tequila production, we thought we’d try to make our own tiny batch of tequila, or “agave spirit”, by hand. (Disclaimer: Anything we make at home ..read more

In 2020 we launched our Tequila Matchmaker Additive-Free program for brands and distilleries that want to be super transparent about their production processes and their non-use of additives. It is an opt-in program, which needs to be renewed each year. Inspections are done on-site and can last from a few hours to a few days, depending on how many brands and products we are reviewing at the distillery. In addition to auditing the production, we ask a lot of questions and perform a sensorial analysis throughout various stages of the tequila-making process. You can read more about our methods a ..read more

While the tequila category has seen explosive growth for the last couple of years, slowly but steadily a new trend is starting to form: the rise of the “agave spirit.” This has long been a blanket term for distillates made by cooking, crushing, fermenting, and distilling agaves, which includes both tequila and mezcal. But it is also a term that is starting to show up more frequently on bottles in the U.S. and Mexico, not only as descriptors of regional spirits (including raicilla and bacanora), but as a category all its own. “The initial growth of mezcal brought more interest in other agave s ..read more

Over the last year or so there have been some excellent blanco tequilas released into the market, so we thought it was high time to put together a blind tasting event to see how these newer products would measure against some popular contenders. We selected four new tequilas in our Confirmed Additive-Free program that we feel are of excellent quality and put them up against 2 well-known products to see how they would compare when tasted blind. In addition, we thought this blind tasting would be a great opportunity to test a couple of myths about tequila preferences. For instance, how much doe ..read more

High agave prices aren’t the only factor driving up the costs of making tequila. Producers are pointing to a number of mostly pandemic-related issues that are making everything from sourcing bottles, printing labels, and shipping products more difficult and costly. “Covid restrictions prevented many companies from operating for a period of time, and then many were granted (permission) to operate under certain restrictions, such as reduced staff and social distancing,” says Steffin Oghene, Vice President of Business Development at Tequila El Tequileño. This has had a knock-on effect, and many ..read more

In a 2018 audio interview, the famed Tequila Ambassador reflects on his life On October 30, 2018 Tomas Estes came to our home in Tlaquepaque, Mexico to interview us for an update he was doing to his book, The Tequila Ambassador. Knowing that he was a far more interesting subject than us, I asked if I could interview him at the end of the day in the style of a Proust Questionnaire – a series of existential questions that I thought he was perfectly suited for since he was such a deep thinker. His response was a typical (for him) open and curious “yes!” so we dove right in. For some reason we nev ..read more

Fans of the aged tequilas, take note. You could be facing a shortage of your favorite sippers, higher prices, or both, as several sources report that they have no more añejo tequila to sell into the marketplace. “Producers have been reluctant to lay down spirit with these high prices (for agave), thinking the price would drop, but it hasn’t and reserves are drying up,” says Jake Lustig, owner of the ArteNOM Selección tequila brand. The price of the raw material to make tequila has spiked in recent years, reaching a high of 32 pesos a kilo, compared to just under 4 pesos per kilo in 2016. Agav ..read more

In 2020 we launched our Tequila Matchmaker Additive-Free program for brands and distilleries that want to be super transparent about their production processes and their non-use of additives. It is an opt-in program, which needs to be renewed each year. Inspections are done on-site and can last from a few hours to a few days, depending on how many brands and products we are reviewing at the distillery. In addition to auditing the production, we ask a lot of questions and perform a sensorial analysis throughout various stages of the tequila-making process. You can read more about our methods a ..read more