El Mayor

A Journey to Perfection

Our process doesn’t accommodate a budget or lighten the load on our backs. It’s a painstaking labor of love. But for us, it’s the only means to crafting the perfect tequila.

Strong Beginnings

To make the best tequila, you need the best agave. And to grow the best agave, you need the perfect conditions. That’s why our agave is only grown in the rocky volcanic soil of Jalisco, yielding a higher sugar content and a superior product.

Hand Cultivated

After the agave is strategically placed and planted, we continue to nurture and care for each and every plant for upwards of seven years – waiting until it’s perfectly matured and ready for distillation.

Individually Selected

Once ready, the agave is hand-selected and harvested by a jimador with a tool called a coa. The jimador prunes it down to the heart, or piña, of the plant, leaving the rest as compost to reintegrate into the soil. This keeps the land fertile and ready to support more agave after a year of rest.

Step 1: Slow Cooked

The selected agave hearts go straight from our fields to our distillery, where they’re chopped and stacked before they endure a 24-hour, chemical-free cooking process using stainless steel ovens for cleanliness and taste.

Step 2: Milling

The cooked agave is then shredded and gently pressed to obtain its juice and retain the full agave flavor.

Step 3: Fermentation

The agave juice is then fermented using a highly guarded, family-owned yeast strain. The yeast then converts the sugars we’ve worked so hard to attain in our agave into alcohol.

Step 4: Distillation

During our double distillation process, we use a combination of heat and pressure in copper-lined pots to extract the richest part of the spirit and preserve its flavor. Once completed, this process yields our blanco offering, which can be either bottled as-is, rested to become reposado or aged to become añejo or extra añejo.

Step 5: Resting or Aging

We believe good things come to those who wait. Our tequila is meticulously aged to perfection in American white oak barrels, and often well beyond industry standards – from nine months to upwards of three-and-a-half years. It’s a patient process, but it provides an end that’s well worth the means.

Carefully Contained

Our finished tequilas are bottled in our particle-free bottling facility. We rinse each bottle with tequila before filling to provide a consistent taste, and hand-apply each label. By this point, each and every bottle has endured over one hundred individual quality checks, ensuring everything that leaves our facility is nothing short of flawless.

Sip and Savor

This arduous process culminates with you and how you enjoy our tequila best. We hope that meeting the hands and seeing the labor that go into crafting each and every bottle of El Mayor® will help you to appreciate it even more.