“Can you recommend a good tequila?” This is a simple question that just about anyone who has an interest in agave spirits likely gets asked by friends, colleagues and family members. But when it comes to modern tequila, it demands a leading follow-up question: Good how?
Nearly seven years ago, when we first compiled a list of blanco tequilas for a blind tasting with some of our favorite tequila drinkers, it was a month after George Clooney’s Casamigos brand became a unicorn, selling to Diageo for a whopping $1 billion. It seemed like the peak before an inevitable downslope of celebrity-backed tequila. Surely the market could bear only so many; surely this was an aberration. But each time we’ve gathered since, another handful of well-publicized celebrity tequilas have entered the market. Each new high-profile release has made that follow-up question—Good how?—more of a mainstream concern than just an industry one. It’s no longer a question of transparency around who is actually making the spirit, but also How?, and Who actually benefits?
Luckily, there are not only more celebrity tequila brands on the market, but also a greater selection of tequilas from artisan brands who have made great farming, fair labor practices and the preservation of traditional methods their mission. What actually ends up in a bottle of tequila has also become more of a consumer concern than ever before. (Spoiler: 70 percent of all tequila contains undisclosed additives, often used to alter flavor or mouthfeel.) The words “additive-free” are now increasingly common on labels from producers who proudly eschew these practices. So, yes, for every great bottle of blanco tequila, there are probably a dozen not-so-great ones, but there is still so much to love about this category, and at an affordable price point.
In searching for best-in-class blanco tequilas, we focused on value (all 16 tequilas we tasted were less than $50, or right at that mark) and bottlings that were singular without breaking from the flavors that have come to define what we love about the category: salinity, minerality, grassiness, earthiness and, above all, purity. For the tasting, Punch editors were joined by spirits expert Joaquín Simó, a co-founder of New York’s beloved Pouring Ribbons, which closed in 2022. As in previous tastings, at best the field showed the incredible range that blue weber agave can express; at worst, there was unevenness in terms of quality, most often manifesting in spirits that were muted, or perhaps delivered on aromatics but struggled to have the kind of textural complexity and completeness of our top picks. But let’s focus on the positives, shall we?
Without further ado, here are our top picks, all of which are additive-free.
