Travel Log: An Inside Look at El Tesoro Tequila’s Legendary La Alteña Distillery

(Photos: Gil Hernandez Valverde)

In September, this journalist was invited 2.5 hours east of Guadalajara, Mexico, to the historied La Alteña distillery. Founded in 1937 by Don Felipe Camarena, the distillery is today best known for brands Tapatio and El Tesoro, the latter of which promised a behind-the-scenes look at its process and a sneak peek of an upcoming release.

El Tesoro is, according to many, one of the all-time greats.

The brand’s combination of tahona-crushed agave, copper pot stills and an additive-free ethos calls back to a time before commercialization, a window into the oft-replicated but rarely perfected “old-school” methodology. I was eager to embark on the pilgrimage. Though I’ve spent a fair bit of time covering agave spirits, I’ll admit that I hadn’t witnessed many of these techniques with my own two eyes.

Notepad in hand, I made the bumpy ride into the highlands alongside a group of journalists, educators and self-professed liquor nerds.

From the Fields

Head of Operations Jenny Camarena extended an arm over rows of agave nestled to the horizon and beyond. It’s hard to put into words the vastness of the scene; imagine a picture-perfect lawn with each blade of grass replaced by a cluster of five-foot-high leathery stalks. In this case, the lawn would stretch over the entire state of Jalisco.

After seven years of basking in the sun, each plant is trimmed down to its heart, otherwise known as a piña.

One fun fact I can’t stop telling everyone in my life is that piñas can actually become bloody under extreme conditions. When subjected to stress — be it heat, adverse weather or wear and tear — the sap inside these plants sometimes takes a bright-red appearance not unlike grenadine.

Jenny told us that the effect translates into numbers. While the industry-standard sugar content for agaves hovers around 25%, El Tesoro claims that theirs can reach as high as 34%.

Many of the agaves loaded into the warehouse for chopping and roasting boasted that telltale reddish-brown tint around the edges. Hatchets raised high, it looked like something out of a horror movie. (I Googled “horror movies set inside a distillery” to complete this metaphor and found disappointingly few results. If anyone’s seen “Distiller” [2016], please let us know if it’s as bad as it looks.)

To the Distillery

The last time I traveled to tequila country, I noted that the iconography of agaves was baked into every nook and cranny. Jalisco is a place where rusted metal piñas perch atop lamp posts, street signs are painted with pointy leaves and even the water gutters vaguely resemble rows of blue Weber. Nowhere can you glance without a reminder that the state harvests, distills and breathes its world-famous spirit.

On second glance, you’ll notice that the Volcán de Tequila is equally ubiquitous — you just have to know where to look. Clocking in at nearly 10,000 feet tall, the volcano looms over its eponymous town like an earthen giant approaching the liquor store. Thankfully for the world’s spirits reserves, the mountain hasn’t erupted in over 2,000 years.

Instead, its influence has steeped into the mineral-rich soil of the region and the names of countless tequila brands; Volcan de Mi Tierra, Cava De Volcan, Oro Volcan… the list goes on. At La Alteña, it takes the form of a two-ton volcanic stone wheel that crushes an endless cascade of agave into pulp.

The amber-brown juice that collects in the pit forms the base of El Tesoro’s tequila. Though slower than the roller mill or the oft-reviled autoclave, tequila made with a tahona tends to boast a richer, terroir-forward palate brimming with those classic agave notes.

This was, by far, the most aromatic leg of the tour. Every time the wheel passed, the group leaned forward in unison to get a better whiff. The scene inside the ring was only slightly less inviting. Piñas smashed by the tahona resembled some kind of alchemy experiment turning strands of hair into liquid gold. Note to self: never get between a tahona and its tequila.

Around the corner, the juice was deposited in bubbling open-air vats for fermentation. This is the point in the process where sugar is broken down by natural yeasts and turned into alcohol molecules. Were you to take a sip right then and there, the alcohol content would hover somewhere in the range of 10% to 20% ABV. Anything higher would kill the yeast hard at work inside the tubs.

Next, a jaunt to the copper pot stills, each shaped like a top hat with its crown stretched too high.

Jenny let us in on another tidbit I hadn’t heard before the trip; El Tesoro distills its spirits to proof. The vast majority of commercially available tequila in the U.S. is bottled at 40% ABV, a figure typically achieved by diluting spirits down with a splash (or downpour) of water. The “original” product as it comes off the still, meanwhile, can reach as high as 60% ABV. In practice, this means that even the best 100% agave brands count an extra serving of  H₂O as a key ingredient.

El Tesoro cuts out the middleman and distills straight to 40% ABV. I held out my cuernito — a traditional drinking vessel shaped like an empty bullhorn — and grabbed a taste as it spilled out of a steel tube. Delicious stuff.

And Into the Barrels

Considering the vast reach of a brand like El Tesoro, it was funny to see that every step in the distillation process was located literal steps from one another. If we hadn’t taken any stops, we could’ve traveled from the ovens to the tahona to the stills in the space of under a minute.

A minute and 10 seconds if you include the cellar. Like many tequila producers, El Tesoro matures its spirits in American oak ex-bourbon casks. In contrast to the searing heat of the fields and the steamy residue of the distillation floor, the barrel cellar was a quiet, cool and musty place where gentle scents of tequila and whiskey mingled through the air.

The perfect penultimate stop on our journey.

This is where we got to lay eyes on some of the “never before seen” stuff. El Tesoro is owned by parent company Suntory Global Spirits, the firm behind heavy hitters including Maker’s Mark, Jim Beam, Booker’s Bourbon, Yamazaki, Hibiki and dozens of others. In theory, El Tesoro could rest its tequila in casks from any of these varied names. Walking through the dim aisles, I spotted a few collaborations scribbled on the sides of barrels that were probably years away from seeing the light.

For the time being, the light is reserved instead for the Mundial Collection. The series was kicked off in 2021 with the debut of The Laphroaig Edition, an añejo aged 12 months in casks that previously held 10-year Single Malt Scotch Whisky reserves. The release was followed up last year with an añejo aged in charred Knob Creek Rye barrels.

I had a feeling we were invited to the distillery for a sneak peek at the third release in the Mundial Collection. Lo and behold, that’s exactly what we got.

Our group was ushered to a roundtable and poured sips of the then-unannounced Basil Hayden Toast Edition. In contrast to previous Mundial bottlings, both of which were añejos, this was a reposado aged six months in Basil Hayden’s slowly toasted then flash-charred oak casks.

Once again, delicious stuff — and that’s coming from someone who almost always prefers an unaged blanco. Hints of baking spice and crème brûlée played ball against stone fruit and agave, later giving way to that signature peppery finish I’ve come to expect from El Tesoro’s products.