Why ‘Additive-Free’ Tequila Is the New ‘100% Agave’

In 2012 Grover and Scarlet Sanschagrin launched the cellular app Tequila Matchmaker as an offshoot of their on-line weblog Style Tequila. By means of the app, Grover and Scarlet have compiled manufacturing data on greater than 2,000 tequila manufacturers, creating an at-your-fingertips database for customers who care to know extra about how their tequila is made.

A number of years in the past, representatives of producers started to method the pair, asking for his or her manufacturers to be listed as additive-free on the app. Nevertheless, as educated catadores (the tequila equal of a sommelier), Grover and Scarlet recognized inconsistencies between many manufacturers’ additive-free claims and what they had been experiencing within the glass.

“We realized this was essential data and customers of our app had been requesting it, so we developed a program for evaluating a model or distiller’s claims,” says Grover. 

These requests for data observe a pattern towards transparency amongst business professionals and customers alike. 

“Within the final 40 years, the patron curiosity within the tequila business has shifted from mixto tequilas to 100% agave tequilas as a result of individuals really feel that may be a extra genuine product,” says Guillermo Erickson Sauza, founding father of Tequila Fortaleza. “The subsequent step to authenticity is additive-free.” 

Not a New Phenomenon

Using components in tequila dates again a whole bunch of years, says investigative journalist Ted Genoways, who has coated agave spirits for greater than a decade. The tequila business noticed its earliest increase within the 1840s and ’50s with the development of a number of massive distilleries. Shortly thereafter, Mexico was plunged into the Battle of Reform within the late 1850s, adopted by the French Intervention within the early 1860s.

“This era of strife left the fields uncared for leading to a blight that affected the agave for many years,” says Genoways.

The business responded by introducing different sugar sources similar to corn and cane sugar along with agave. Nevertheless, the ensuing tequila was riddled with dangerous aromas and flavors because of the blighted materia prima, or uncooked materials. Sugar and chemical components, together with liquid ether, had been used to masks off-putting aromas and flavors.

Tequila’s erstwhile repute for inflicting hangovers was the results of these dangerous components. Large agave growers and distillers banded collectively within the Eighteen Eighties to push for a high quality commonplace that required producers to create additive-free tequila from 100% agave, however their efforts had been fruitless. A worldwide motion round meals security within the early 1900s led to the ban of some components, however solely those who had been doubtlessly dangerous to client well being and even deadly.  

Some agave merchandise now thought of conventional resulted from these early experiments with components. Tequila almendrado, an almond-flavored tequila-based liqueur, grew out of a number of the early makes an attempt at barrel growing old, whereas the addition of animal fat and fruits to the distillate, initially supposed to cover flaws, helped type a brand new class of spirits known as pechugas.

“There may be a variety of romanticism round it,” says Genoways. “We like to think about these merchandise as conventional, however it actually is rising out of that very same lineage of protecting one thing up at a time when the agave simply isn’t the place you prefer to it to be.”

In fashionable instances, using components has elevated with the implementation of extra industrialized technique of manufacturing.

“Many [agave] merchandise are made in a particularly quick, industrial, impartial method,” says Grover. “The one alternative [producers] have is to make use of components to carry some sort of aroma and taste again to the distillate. So as an alternative of utilizing the method to generate pure aromas and flavors, they short-circuit the method by making a less expensive product after which use components to offer it some character.”

What Components Are Hiding

Presently the laws governing tequila manufacturing permits for 4 kinds of components, or abocantes—caramel coloring, oak extract, glycerin, and sugar-based syrups known as jarabes. These substances could also be used to create consistency, evoke barrel growing old, add sweetness and/or taste essences, or conceal defects within the product. 

By regulation, a producer can embrace as much as 1% by weight of those components of their tequila with out having to point so on the label. Which means that a bottle labeled “100% agave” may nonetheless comprise a small quantity of components, and whereas 1% or much less could seem miniscule, it may possibly have an outsize affect on the ultimate product. “The energy and efficiency of right this moment’s components are so sturdy and concentrated that we now have by no means seen something near 1%,” says Grover. “Should you had been to make use of 1% it could not even resemble tequila as a result of [the ingredients are] so highly effective.”

The method to be listed in Grover and Scarlet’s just lately renamed Additive-Free Alliance entails analysis on a number of ranges, together with interviews of these working within the distillery, samples taken all through the manufacturing course of, and an intensive audit of logs stored on the distillery in compliance with governmental companies.

“You principally should open all of your doorways to them, actually all of them,” says Sergio Mendoza, founder and director of Tequila Don Fulano.  

Grover and Scarlet additionally buy bottles from retailers to check what’s being bought to customers with what’s being provided on the distillery. If there are important modifications in taste profile, samples are despatched for laboratory evaluation.

“We’re within the technique of incorporating extra laboratory evaluation, however it’s the a part of this system that has been extraordinarily costly for us,” says Grover. “We take in the bills of this system for the primary yr as we don’t need the associated fee to get in the way in which of somebody collaborating in this system. Within the second yr, if the model has seen worth in collaborating in this system and wish to renew, there’s a really useful donation.” 

Educating Shoppers on Additive-Free Tequila

Scarlet and Grover’s challenge is actually gaining traction—Tequila Matchmaker at the moment lists over 100 manufacturers as a part of the Additive-Free Alliance, and extra are requesting to be evaluated. However are customers within the challenge?

“We’ve seen an unbelievable rise in curiosity for additive-free tequila amongst our clientele inside the final yr,” says Eileen Elliott, director of operations at Social Wines in South Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Persons are being educated about components in tequila by way of social media and podcasts. We additionally place bottle tags with the Additive-Free Alliance decal to point which manufacturers are additive-free. Since our agave assortment inside our wine store is 90% additive-free, the ratio of tags to [no tag] completely encourages questions from greater than half of the visitors procuring the gathering.”

The curiosity in additive-free tequila can also be impacting what we’re seeing in bars across the nation.

“Additive-free is totally essential for us when making choices, particularly as tequila’s prominence continues to develop,” says Ryan Lotz, beverage director for Traveler Avenue Hospitality in Boston. “Anybody shopping for tequila is making a choice to assist or not assist particular elements of the class and to assist shield its tradition and significance. I feel it’s essential that nobody take the place their greenback goes evenly when contemplating the preservation of the class. For me, additive-free means the manufacturers don’t have anything to cover behind, that they’re doing issues the fitting method, and they’re serving to to shepherd the class.”

Maxwell Reis, beverage director at Mírate in Los Angeles, ties the newfound curiosity in additive-free tequila to the expansion of the mezcal class. 

“I feel customers have realized that mezcal is a lot extra unadulterated, that even at its core nearly all of mezcal manufacturers available on the market which might be problematic are thought of problematic not due to components, however due to issues similar to practices round sourcing uncooked materials,” says Reis. “So individuals are coming again to tequila from mezcal, and in search of that purity, and it’s beginning a much wider dialog.”

For Clayton Szczech, creator of A Subject Information to Tequila, the significance of additive-free tequila lies within the academic element for customers. 

“There are individuals moving into tequila probably not understanding what a distillate from fermented cooked agave juice tastes like,” says Szczech. “Using components has created a false baseline for a lot of customers. Let’s begin the dialog with tequilas which might be coming as shut as potential to having three components—agave, yeast, and water—as a baseline.” 

“Grover and Scarlet and different individuals have carried out a variety of work to coach individuals’s palates in that method and I feel that’s actually essential,” he provides.  

Mendoza says using components robs the patron of a very powerful facet of tequila: the agave. “The customers don’t get to expertise, establish, and fall in love with the pure bounty and fantastic thing about mature agave, which is actually what makes agave spirits so distinctive,” he says. “The necessity for utilizing components and altering the pure course of arises as a result of we now have misplaced a connection on the supply, within the uncooked materials, which alone makes nice tequila.”

Pondering Past Additive-Free

Whereas agave specialists all say that components are an essential a part of the dialog round transparency, they stress that the additive-free label just isn’t the one indicator of high quality. 

“It’s potential to have a low-quality tequila that doesn’t comprise components,” says Grover. “Our position is to not play decide and jury about that are high quality tequilas. We’re right here solely to point whether or not components are current or not.” 

Salvador Rosales Trejo, grasp distiller of Tequila Cascahuín, says it’s essential to do not forget that labeling phrases are, on the finish of the day, used to market a product.

“Sustainability, artisanal, and additive-free are all phrases which have been equated with high quality,” he says. “To start out, these phrases had been used to assist educate the patron, however alongside the way in which they started to be misused for advertising and marketing functions. I really feel {that a} philosophy of high quality needs to be primarily based upon a model’s transparency, traceability, and producer ethics. The class of tequila needs to be specializing in supporting its pure and human assets to be able to place it the place it needs to be.”  

Szczech provides an identical sentiment. “I feel something that helps customers in prosperous nations actually take into consideration the truth that commodities have a historical past, they usually have social relationships embedded in them, helps us to get past the fetishization of commodities,” he says. “If components are a method into that dialog, then I’m all for it.”