Patron where is it made

Del Toro might not pour his tequila over a pile of jewels, but his ad campaign is no surprise decidedly intense. Co-founder Martin Crowley designed the logo, which — and we seriously never noticed this — has a hornet on the label. Tequila used to be made with something called the ancient Tahona process , wherein heartless tequila distillers force a donkey to drag a massive volcanic stone over agave hearts prior to cooking and distilling them.

We assume that donkey hates his life. This gave tequila a bad rep in the spirits world at the time, especially in the USA where most of the exports went. Patron changed all that, though it took a long time for drinkers to realise that tequila could be as sophisticated and complex as any other spirit. But they did sell, and today at its distillery on the edge of the little town of El Nacimiento in Jalisco, Patron employs people as our guide Mariana Sanchez explains.

We could mechanise it tomorrow and have the whole thing taken care of by about people and computers, but we cannot put people out of work. We are part of the local community, and we look after each other.

We would also lose our traditions. One of these is to crush the cooked agave using the tahona process, which only a handful of distilleries do. The tahona is a large circular piece of volcanic stone which is turned like a millstone and separates the juice from the fibre before fermentation.

Patron has ten tahona pits in five separate parts of their huge distillery, and they are working constantly in what is a labour-intensive process. In each of the five tahona areas they also have eleven copper pot stills. Six are tall and skinny, for the first distillation, and five are shorter and rounder, for the second distillation. We find that 79 hours gives us the best results. What makes Patron unusual, though, is that as well as the tahona process they also use the more modern roller mill process to separate juice and fibre from some of the blue agave plants.

Their original Patron Silver is a blend of tequilas from the two processes, although their Roca Patron, introduced in , is a more artisanal tequila which uses only the ancient tahona process. We discover the difference between the two processes, and the importance of blending, at the tasting that takes place at the end of the tour.

For a reposado tequila, that means at least two months in wood. Each step of that process contributes to the complex character of a great tequila. But lately, more and more of us are looking for spirits that were made using a tahona. When you create a spirit that tequila superfans like, people tend to hear about it. Published: June 25,