Why we distill to 46%

Siempre comes off the still at 46%, then goes into the bottle at 40%. Both numbers are real, and the gap between them is where most of the work happens. The label reads 40% alc/vol — 80 proof, like most tequila you will pick up. What the label cannot tell you is where the liquid started, and that is the part that decides how it tastes.

Distillation proof is a flavor decision. Alcohol is the vehicle that carries the aromatic compounds you actually want from cooked agave — the citrus, the cooked-yam sweetness, the pepper and minerality. Come off the still too low and you have already thrown away the thing you spent two weeks in the oven building. You cannot add it back later.

Under Mexico's NOM-006-SCFI-2012 standard, tequila may be bottled anywhere from 35–55% alcohol by volume. Forty percent is simply where most bottles in Canada and the United States land — it is not the category's floor, and it says nothing about how the liquid was made. Two tequilas can share a label number and have almost nothing else in common.

Why 46 and not 42

This was not a number picked off a marketing deck. As our co-founder puts it: we tried 40, 41, 42 — failed, failed, failed — until 46 passed. Too low and the agave goes quiet. Too high and the heat starts to bully the fruit, and you lose the very nuance you were chasing. Forty-six is where, for our liquid, the agave is at full volume and the alcohol still reads as warmth rather than burn. It is a tasting decision, made at the still, repeated until the glass agreed.

Then the water gets a vote

Every tequila bottled below its distillation proof is cut with water, and almost nobody talks about which water. We use deep well water — drawn from below, mineral-steady, and consistent batch to batch. It brings the spirit from 46% down to 80 proof without flattening it.

That step is not a formality. Cut a spirit with the wrong water and you can dull a good distillate in an afternoon: chlorinated water strips aromatics, hard water can leave a chalky edge, and anything inconsistent means this batch does not taste like the last one. Proofing down is the last chance to ruin something you got right, so it gets treated like a real production step, not a rounding operation.

What this costs

Distilling to 46% means less liquid per batch than a lower-proof run would give us. We make that trade on purpose. The whole point of working with the Vivanco family at NOM 1414 and master distiller Sergio Cruz and its brick ovens is to taste the agave clearly. Coming off the still lower would quietly undo a lot of that work.

None of this means more proof is automatically better. Past a point, alcohol stops carrying flavor and starts erasing it. The skill is in finding the number where your specific liquid is most itself, and then bringing it down to bottle strength carefully enough that it stays that way.

Pour a Reposado neat and give it a minute in the glass. Eighty proof on the label, forty-six at the still, deep well water in between. That is the whole recipe for why it keeps talking to you.