A Guide🧭To The Different Types Of Tequila. What Tequila Should You Be Drinking?

[Music] tequila's history and culture is deeply rooted in Mexican heritage nestled deep within the state of Jalisco in central Mexico lies a small magical town that is the birthplace of the drink that bears its name red volcanic soil will agave fields around the city with cobblestone streets guiding around colorful shops and famous tequila distilleries this is where it gobby enthusiasts come to explain to you if you want to taste a wide range of tequila's then look no further than the tasting room of Licata the team here is well-versed in tradition history and all aspects of agave spirits I'm excited to introduce you to Kelowna public Asha my mentor Clayton who teaches me all about the different types of tequila I'm Jeff I just retired from the military soul everything I own and now I'm a traveling around the world to learn from Raghu's winemakers distillers and tell their story this is my journey wine and spirits [Applause] I had been coming to Mexico since about 1995 really fell in love with the language and the culture as a teenager and was living in a different part of Mexico over on the Gulf Coast I started getting really interested in the beverage started trying a lot of different tequila's noticed how different they could be noticed how some were exquisite and some were really really bad and got curious about why that was how how something that nominally on the label seemed to be the same could be so wildly different so after living that a cruise for about a year I had read everything I could get my hands on about tequila both in Spanish in English and it just seemed bizarre this plant this weird spiky plant that doesn't need water for most of the year that can go through long droughts and survive that takes seven or eight years to reach maturity and then it's killed to make this booze it seemed otherworldly it seemed just fantastical to me and I wanted to come see it for myself I came for the town of tequila Jalisco the first time I think in about 2007 and just fell in love with the town and knew I wanted to come back and knew I wanted to expose what I had seen here to other people to people from the United States and outside of Mexico and the the idea of doing educational tours was born then I started bringing people down in 2008 and we opened Licata in 2017 so it's it's been a lot of learning in a short period of time [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] since I've been here I feel that there's a lack of education when it comes to tequila not only nice but globally yeah I mean all we're learning to do is basically hey shot you know like the salt drink the line lemon wherever you're right yeah and that's basically I thought since being here I found that you know there's some complexity to this and some respect ability to how its produced and that's totally fascinating for me and that's why I'm glad I found you because you can explain all of this to not only myself but to our viewers so please explain to me yeah the types well absolutely so the first thing you want to know about tequila is that there are two categories and if you're serious enough to be watching Jeff show you want to be sticking to one category which is hundred-percent agave tequila as everybody watching this knows all alcohol comes from sugar we classify different types of alcohols based on what that sugar came from 100% agave tequila means that 100% of the alcohol in there came from sugar of the blue agave and nothing else if it doesn't say hundred percent of ghave tequila on the label it just says tequila that means that up to forty nine percent of that alcohol was derived from non agave sugars up to an including high fructose corn syrup so we avoid that here anything you'll see in my bar or around me generally will be under percent agave tequila within that we have five classes of tequila here we have the four most common we have Blanco or Plata also called silver in English these tequila's are the truest expression of both the agave and the distillers craft purists like myself tend to prefer Blancos for people newer to tequila or newer to spirits in general they might be a little aggressive or a little harsh if you come from North America or Anglo societies in general you're more used to brown spirits so the barrel age stuff will be a little friendlier but the Blanco is is really the weight Aquila was born and it's really where you get the true essence of the agave it's also difficult to impossible to hide flaws in a Blanco so you really know what you're they're these spirits are generally completely on Aged generally will have no contact with wood per the tequila norm they can be in contact with wood for up to 60 days most Blancos and certainly traditional Blancos will not have any contact with wood so they're true white spirits in the world of white spirits agave spirits are the most aromatically and chemically complex white spirits in the world so you can stand this up next to any way any unaged whiskey any unaged rum any vodka gin and you're gonna find a much wider array of aromas and flavors you know in a white tequila if we take those tequila's and put them in oak for over two months we have what we can call out a possible arrested tequila these tequila's are very very popular in Mexico they're pretty popular in the United States in my opinion this is just opinion but this is the hardest class of tequila to really really do well because it's all about balance it's all about moderation you generally want some of that freshness and spiciness and herb allottee of the Blanco to come through but you want a little bit of that softer touch and sweetness from the oak to balance that out it should be neither too far in one direction or the other so to Pasado's I think are a very difficult class of tequila to master but can be very very nice if a tequila is in a oak barrel of no larger than 600 liters for a minimum of a year we can call it an Anejo which is a one-year-old tequila now we're getting deeper into the world of oak can be American oak typically for both Apple silos and hijos they're gonna be used American whiskey barrels but it can be new American new French used French Hungarian Canadian any kind of oak you got if the barrel is no larger than 600 liters and it's been in there for a year you can call that on and yellow they are gonna be starting to get darker take on more chocolate vanilla perhaps coffee and hazelnut cinnamon tones from the barrel if it's American oak they're gonna start to drink a little bit more like a whiskey if it's French oak it's gonna start to drink a little bit more like a French brandy or cognac we're harming in that same maximum size barrel at minimum of three years we have extra echoes and you can see even just on the color alone we're now very much into the world of the barrel to the world of folk these are gonna stand up in the best cases against you know your finest whiskies or your finest cognac sore arm in the axe we have in your hand there that's what I so that's in new French oak barrels for a minimum of three years and we'll have a lot in common with a cognac when they're well aged it will still definitely speak to you as a tequila but with a heavy heavy touch of the barrel yeah I'm a connoisseur I'm new to tequila I buy let's say three or four bottles different ranges how should one store the tequila and well it's it's much less sensitive than wine it's much less volatile than y-you don't have to worry about it being open ideally you want it in a cool darker place like a kitchen cabinet or something like that if you're tasting tequila you want it to be in Nice glassware preferably stemware and you want it to be at room temperature if you've already evaluated that tequila you've already tasted it you know what you feel about it you like it you want to drink it if you're drinking for pleasure as opposed to tasting to evaluate if you want to cool it off in the refrigerator if you want to throw an ice cube in there I'm you know quite a quite a snob when it comes to tequila but I see no problem with any of that because you're now at that point drinking for pleasure it's your liquid you should do with it what's going to give you the most pleasure out of it so in terms of tasting you want it always at room temperature in terms of drinking however you like it storage cool dark place I would say that when the bottle gets lower than halfway this is a rule of thumb there I don't know the you know that this is the scientific gospel but in my experience especially with aged tequila's when it gets lower than half you have that much oxygen in there it's gonna start oxidizing just like anything else will it's gonna start evaporating alcohol faster it's gonna start losing flavor so my rule of thumb is when it gets halfway it's time to drink it have some friends over kill the bottle you know you can if it's something special you can nurse it about halfway down but once you get to halfway you're gonna need to put it into a smaller container which kills a little bit of the romance of the label so when I get when I get to about halfway I just have some friends over and finish the bottle because otherwise you hang on to it for too long it's gonna turn to what we sometimes call agave water where you've lost the alcohol you've lost the backbone and it's a very very mild in flavor my biggest thing is is when I go and shop for tequila's you know you see a huge range product line I'm looking at I see you know $20 and I see your range up to you know 50 60 $70 my understanding is now from this week and working with a lot of the distilleries is there's a lot that goes in to making my Kela talk to me about you know some of these these misconceptions you have about spending quality money on a quality product particular yeah there's definitely a persistent idea that tequila should be cheap that's only for parties for shooters for four basic pre batch cocktails the fact is as you've seen is that it's extremely labor-intensive process and the raw material in the form of the blue agave takes a minimum of five or six years to mature so that's an investment in land that you've got to take care of that you've got a weed that you've got fertilized and right now in 2019 we're at a historic peak for the price of agave agave has never been more expensive than it is right now it's about twenty five to twenty seven pesos per kilo which gave you some context for that about ten years ago it was 50 Mexican cents a kilo so we're talking about a 50x price swing and the raw material obviously you can't increase the bottle price by 50 times or no one would buy it so there's a real squeeze on the producers which is a real squeeze on the farmers when when the price gets low when the price is high the farmers are doing well but the producers have a real squeeze because they can't raise the prices that much I would encourage everybody when they look at a bottle of tequila to think about a couple of things one is even the quote-unquote worst tequila even the cheapest tequila that you are I might not find CIPA bull or truly enjoyable that tequila also started with a lot of work in the fields that of tequila was also made with a plant that took maybe six or seven years to reach maturity was planted by hand it was tended by hand it was harvested by hand so to me all tequila deserves our respect for that reason all things being equal it's gonna be more expensive to produce a liquor from an agave a semi-arid plant that takes these many years to produce whereas your finest whiskey your finest cognac is made from a grain or a fruit that took one year to produce not to take anything away from that but your basic raw material cost is just a exponentially different in the case of tequila when we start to get concerned with with social issues of you know how well are the growers being paid is this a family-owned brand how much labor is involved versus is it an entirely industrialized process even though salaries are pretty low in Mexico if you have a handmade product where maybe 30 or 40 different people are involved in the process of making it versus a very industrial product where maybe two or three pairs of hands are on that from the beginning to the end give a big bump in cost when you get into the Reposado and Yahoo's extra air hose if we like these aged versions of the spirits it's important to keep in mind especially when you get to the extreme of any Oh an extra añejo that in a place like Jalisco where most akhil is from it's a very very dry arid environment so even in a good barrel house we're gonna have a much higher angel share than in most whiskey's so it's not out of the question here to lose 10% of volume a year from a barrel so if we're drinking an extra añejo that's a minimum of three years it's entirely possible that a third of that barrel is gone so you and I as lovers of extra añejo say we're not only paying for the tequila that's in the bottle we're frame paying for the tequila that's gone also so that's why you're gonna see those price jumps and I would encourage people to recognize that because of the raw material and because of the intense amount of labor involved all things being equal tequila should be a relatively expensive product compared to other spirit categories [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so last question yeah talk to me again new tequila looking at labels on this you did a great job explaining you know the different varieties what else should I be mindful yeah what I'm looking at the labels here on tequila I'm gonna assume that most people watching the show are in a market where they're not gonna be dealing with a lot of pirate products or pseudo tequila's or things like that but just in case and unfortunately it does happen a lot down here in Mexico you want to look and see every bottle of tequila somewhere on the label sometimes it's very prominent sometimes it's very small you're gonna see this acronym n om for normal physiologic gonnna that acronym is going to be on almost any product made in Mexico from from engine blocks to washers and driers to tequila then you're gonna see a four digit number then here to see another three three-letter acronyms CR T for consejo regulador de tequila the tequila regulatory council those three things together in that font tell us that this is a legitimate bottle of tequila now the CRT is the watchdog of the industry it's a independent agency authorized by the Mexican state and funded by the teal industry to enforce and interpret the norm the norm are the rules about tequila so they're the tequila police but they're also the tequila Supreme Court they they interpret the law they enforce the law and they do quite a good job with this and what this tells us it doesn't tell us what's in the bottle is good that's a matter of taste but what it tells us is that everything on the label is correct it tells us that this is a tequila this is 100% agave tequila it's in the Blanco class and that the norm of this number yeah every every bottle is going to have a four-digit noam number which identifies for us what producer is responsible for the tequila in that bottle so the CRT is guaranteeing to me that this is 100% agave tequila Blanco and the gentleman at symbol law are responsible for what's in this so knowing those known numbers now some dorks like me they'll be numbers that we know off the top of our head because they're our favorites or they're maybe sometimes ones we like to avoid but you know that there's a really great tool that our friends at tequila matchmaker have developed the Kela matchmaker app and the most basic function of that app is to use to identify tequila's based on that known number so you know where it came from what other brands they make there so if you really like this one but you can't find it maybe you can hunt for something from the same gnome that may be of a similar quality or similar profile yeah awesome well another life Thank You Clayton so much no thank you Jeff explaining the different varieties I learned so much I hope you guys enjoy and learn just as much as I did about tequila Clayton again thank you [Music] you

Channel: Jeff Bradford

Views: 496,626

Keywords: beer, wine, spirits, jeff bradford, best beer channel, best wine channel, best spirits channel, jeff beer, craft beer, beer review, distillers, distilleries, tequila, agave, how tequila is made, what are the different types of tequila, tequila cocktails, reposado, anjeo, extra anjeo, blanco, Clayton tequila, tequila matchmaker, mexico, what tequila should I buy, what are the different varieties of tequila?, what tequila should I buy?, blue weber agave, 100 percent agave

Id: YFx5f6_Z6vM

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2019