Next Wave Awards Spirits Brand of the Year: Tequila Ocho

This feature is part of our 2024 Next Wave Awards.

Tequila Ocho doesn’t have a celebrity tie-in. It doesn’t bottle its juice in ornate, art-festooned bottles destined for a second life as a vase. Its name doesn’t pay tribute to some ancient legend or vague element of Mexican culture. Instead, it references the distilled batch sample that co-founders and agave legends Carlos Camarena and Tomas Estes decided to bottle after painstaking experimentation. The brand spends its energy organically highlighting the land surrounding the facility in the Jalisco highlands — an approach to agave that separates the 16-year-old distillery from the rest of the tequila crowd.

Credit: Karime Gazale & Fanny Reyes

These singular practices are on full display at Los Alambiques, a canary-hued distillery and visitors’ experience perched some 7,000 feet above sea level outside Arandas. Opened in 2023, it’s a love letter to agave and the surrounding terrain’s vibrant earth tones that make for a stunning destination, but it’s also a complement to the brand’s low-key philosophy.

“It’s a very unusual tequila. It’s not very commercial,” explains Jesse Estes, Tomas’s son and Tequila Ocho’s global brand ambassador. “It’s really created as a passion project.”

That passion has propelled the brand to become a backbar darling. And the chatter — and the tastings inspired by such gospel — has propelled Tequila Ocho to top-of-mind for the trade and consumers alike.

“That’s the magic of the brand,” explains Tequila Ocho creative director Fany Camarena, Carlos’s daughter. “We didn’t need to create a story. People feel the story when they taste our tequilas.”

Credit: Karime Gazale & Fanny Reyes

That’s not to say Tequila Ocho doesn’t have an important tale to tell. In 2006, fifth-generation farmer and third-generation tequilero Carlos joined forces with Tomas, a trailblazing agave evangelist credited with bringing tequila and mezcal into Europe. Their collaborative goal was to craft single-estate-grown tequila that would demonstrate the concept of terroir in agave spirits. At the time, it was a personal project with no machinations on hitting the market and capturing the attention of what Fany refers to as the “geeks of tequila.”

“They weren’t even thinking about it as a business,” she says. “It was just two guys talking about it as a hobby.”

Hobby or not, what Carlos and Tomas set out to achieve was mind-bending. Words and phrases like terroir and estate-grown were the domain of the wine world, but the two succeeded in their mission by leaning into viticultural strategies. They took note of the fields where the agaves were grown; they marked the harvesting seasons; they rejected additives and shortcuts. Their efforts led to a pioneering spirit that showcases the symbiosis between the plant and the land in every dram poured.

Credit: Karime Gazale & Fanny Reyes

Tequila Ocho’s approach includes some intriguing quirks that further distinguish the brand from the crowd. They patiently wait to harvest overripe agaves from carefully selected fields, which means the bottles produced are never one-to-one flavor analogues. The quality will remain consistently exceptional, but there may be some variances in flavor notes from harvest to harvest. These nuanced differences allow their expressions to click with certain customers with greater efficiency whenever Jesse or Fany host visitors in Los Alambiques’ subterranean tasting rooms. “If guests love wine, they’re going to understand Tequila Ocho,” Jesse says.

Credit: Karime Gazale & Fanny Reyes

Community is also a longstanding pillar of the business, and the jimadors skillfully farming its agave are central to it. Several of them have been working with Carlos for decades; the oldest jimador, Guillermo Padilla, is still going strong at 72. Even though Heaven Hill acquired the brand in 2022, the distillery has maintained these relationships and fiercely protected its commitment to the land and its people. This passion has its advantages.

“We work with about 200 people, and these include families that have worked with our family for multiple generations,” says Fany. “Because they’ve worked with us for that long, they know exactly what needs to be done.”

Credit: Karime Gazale & Fanny Reyes

Carlos is as active in the business as ever as Tequila Ocho’s master distiller. Tomas sadly passed away in 2021, though his aura within the world of agave spirits still glows brightly, and Fany and Jesse work tirelessly to uphold their fathers’ legacies. While they acknowledge it’s a hefty task, it’s also one they fully embrace.

“I don’t feel pressure to live up to them. I feel pride,” Jesse explains. “Tequila Ocho still feels like a labor of love, and it is an absolute blessing that we get to carry on their legacy.”

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