El Mayor - A Journey to Perfection

A Journey to Perfection.

The process doesn’t accommodate a budget, or lighten a load of the hard labor it takes to achieve the final product.

It’s a painstaking labor of love, and the only means to crafting the perfect tequila.

PROCESS

STRONG BEGINNINGS

To make the best tequila, you need the best agave. And to grow the best agave, you need the perfect conditions. This is the reason why the agave for El Mayor tequila is only grown in the rocky volcanic soil of Jalisco estate, yielding a higher sugar content and a superior product.

HAND CULTIVATED

After the agave is strategically placed and planted, the agave continues to be nurtured and cared for, 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, taking the heart, or piña, of the plant and leaving the rest as compost. This keeps the land fertile and ready to support more agave after a year of rest.

SLOW COOKED

The selected agave hearts go straight from the fields to the distillery. They’re chopped, stacked and endure a 24-hour, chemical free cooking process using autoclaves rather than ovens for cleanliness and taste. The cooked agave is then shredded and gently pressed to obtain its juice and retain the full agave flavor.

FERMENTATION & DISTILLATION

The agave juice is then fermented using a highly-guarded, family-owned yeast strain, converting the sugars into alcohol. Then, during the double distillation process, El Mayor uses 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 the blanco offering which can be either bottled as it is, or aged to become reposado, añejo or extra añejo.

AGED GRACEFULLY

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

CAREFULLY CONTAINED

Finished tequilas are bottled in El Mayor's family-owned, particle-free bottling facility. They 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 El Mayor's facility is nothing short of flawless.