In This Story:
Why Cambio is one of just a handful of tequilas made with four artisanal processes
Why Cambio’s founder is so passionate about additive-free
The coffee liqueur made in the biggest French press on Earth
How a Chicago chef created a highly regarded craft tequila brand with help from his wife’s Mexican family
In April of 2020, when almost nobody was flying anywhere, John des Rosiers was on a plane to Guadalajara. His cousin Valerie had asked him to look at a tequila project. A grower she knew had agave, land, and an idea, and he wanted somebody from outside the tequila business to help shape the brand.
des Rosiers was not an obvious choice, but he did know food and the relationship between patience and flavor.
He started cooking at 15 in a French kitchen, trained at the Culinary Institute of America, staged at Charlie Trotter's, spent six years at Gabriel's in Highwood, and opened his own restaurant, Inovasi, in Lake Bluff, Illinois at the age of 30. But he had never made a spirit.
He ended up touring 18 tequila distilleries and watched production at each one. The part of the process that shook him was fermentation.
The tanks were hot, and the fermentations were fast. He asked the distillers why. Why not cool it down? Why not use a different yeast? Why does everyone do it essentially the same way? The answers did not satisfy him.
There has to be a better way than using bread yeast to ferment something at 90 degrees in four and a half days, for a plant that spent eight years growing in the most amazing soil on Earth.
Asked whether he thought he could do something different or something better, he says, "I thought better. I've never been a person who wanted to do things differently just for the sake of being different. I don't think there's any point to that. If you're going to change something, you should be asking, if I change this, will it produce a better result?"
His tequila brand, Cambio (which means “change” in Spanish) is the outcome of that philosophy.
John des Rosiers. Image courtesy of Cambio Tequila.
des Rosiers’ wife, Cecy, was raised in Arandas in the Highlands of Jalisco until she was 10, and much of her family still lives there. That connection is the reason he was on the plane at all.
The name Cambio is somewhat misleading, because the foundation of the brand and its approach to tequila is deliberately old. des Rosiers’ embraces what makes tequila special, and different from other spirits.
"I knew that you didn't need to put anything in it to make it beautiful," he says. "Agave is one of those things where if you treat it properly and you make it the right way, you can drink it right out of the still and it's soft and beautiful and delicious. It’s not the same with whiskey. Nobody ever says the moonshine is soft and beautiful and delicious right out of the still."
His definition of traditional tequila-making includes four steps requiring much effort:
cooked only in brick or stone ovens
crushed only by tahona
fermented only in open, wooden tanks
distilled only in copper stills
Each requires specific equipment a distillery either already owns or has to be willing to build or buy. It’s not easy, which is why only a very small number of tequila brands do all four across all bottles in their lineup. Unofficially, they include: Cambio, Alto Canto, El Tesoro, Fortaleza, Laelia, and Nuestro Placer.
The rarity of this approach turned out to be the problem for des Rosiers and his plans for Cambio.
Which Distilleries Said No to Cambio, and Why?
Of the 18 distilleries he visited and asked about making Cambio, only three were even open to what he wanted to try.
Cascahuín would not agree to tahona-only production, because no brand made inside that distillery runs on tahona alone, except for their eponymous Cascahuín Tahona Blanco.
Others had no tahona at all, and would not build one, and would not let Cambio build one for them.
Overhead the tahona at the distillery Inulina y Miel de Agave, where Cambio is made. Image courtesy of Cambio Tequila.
More often the answer was that there was no space, or no time, or that it simply was not done that way here. And granted, a Chicago chef popping into the distillery and asking if he could change how tequila was made was not always a welcome request.
Cambio made its test batches at El Pandillo, famously the home of G4, and other brands. But with G4’s own rapid expansion, they couldn’t ultimately accommodate another guest brand.
When des Rosiers brand says only a handful of producers make tequila all four of those ways, the reason is not that nobody else wants to do so. It is that doing it requires a distillery willing to be rebuilt around you, at least to some degree. And when they are already making tequila, that kind of shift would be like changing the engine of a vehicle moving at top speed.
How Did Cambio Find a Distillery Nobody Was Using?
des Rosiers’ cousin Valerie drives the road between Guadalajara and Arandas constantly. She has a house in the city and family in the town.
She heard there was a distillery on that road with tahonas that nobody was operating. Eventually, she pulled off the highway and asked the men out front whether she could look around.
Three ovens. Two tahonas. A genuinely beautiful building. All stainless steel fermentation tanks, and a quarter inch of dust over everything, because nobody had been using any of it.
The distillery is Inulina y Miel de Agave (NOM 1605), in Capilla de Guadalupe in the southern Highlands of Jalisco. Cecy des Rosier's family lives about 25 minutes away.
The property has three production buildings, and the contrast between them is the juxtaposition of the modern tequila business in one location. The first building is a diffuser operation: two employees, glass walls, an office so precisely organized that there is tape marking where the keyboard and the mouse belong, and millions of liters a year leaving in tanker trucks without ever seeing a bottle. It is industrial and efficient.
The building Cambio is made in has an entirely different set of equipment, and a lot of people scurrying around doing manual work to create a spirit also called tequila. Two massively different philosophies, roughly 100 feet apart, sharing a driveway.
The brick oven at the distillery Inulina y Miel de Agave, where Cambio is made. Image courtesy of Cambio Tequila.
When des Rosiers heard Valerie’s description of the dusty (at that time) facility, he made the call immediately. Everything difficult was already there. The wooden tanks were the only part that needed changing, from stainless steel to oak, and he figured “how hard could that be?”
Well, it took 18 months. The oak staves for the fermentation tanks came from Tennessee, 25 feet long each and heavy enough to need equipment to move, and they sat at the border for nine months while the wood was inspected for bacteria.
des Rosiers is clear-eyed about how close he came to all of this not working. "If my cousin didn't find that distillery, we wouldn't have a brand, because there was no place to make it," he says. "Even today, with more artisanal equipment being installed at distilleries, it would be hard to find a place to do Cambio."
How does Cambio Make Their Tequila Different?
Start with what is conventional, because most of it is. Whole agave, cooked in brick ovens. Extraction by tahona, the volcanic stone wheel, using cold water, over about three hours. Fermentation in tanks lined with hand-fitted wooden staves, half Mexican pine and half with that American white oak from Tennessee. Double distillation in copper pot stills.
But there are differentiators that Cambio uses in their production that you just don’t see much in modern tequila-making.
The fermentation is cold. Most tequila ferments somewhere around 85 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit on yeast derived from bread or beer strains. Cambio ferments between 45 and 50 degrees, on a variety of unique yeasts that die above 60 degrees. Get the tank too warm and the batch is ruined.
Five different yeast strains are in rotation now, and the coldest of them eat sugars all the way down at a temperature of 38 degrees.
Cold fermentation is slow. Primary fermentation for Cambio takes 12 days, roughly three times the industry norm, and then the tanks sit for another two or three days so the liquid can complete a full malolactic fermentation on its own. This secondary fermentation softens the acid profile and changes the citric character, while also creating texture.
This malolactic fermentation is why Cambio’s expressions are sometimes described as having a “funky” aroma. It’s a combination of fruity and cheesy smells that aren’t common in tequila.
Because the slow fermentation builds longer-chain molecules, Cambio holds together down to 20 degrees below zero without the fats separating out. This means if your bottle happens to get cold, it won’t also get cloudy, as happens with most other tequila.
Also, there are no cuts. Most distillers discard (“cut”) the beginning (the “heads”) and the end (“the tails”) of each batch of tequila when it is coming off the still. This is done for two reasons.
First, the the beginning and the end of distillation contain higher levels of volatile compounds that can be harmful in higher concentrations. Because tequila is significantly regulated, there are very strict limits to how many of these compounds, like methanol and ethanol, are allowed in each batch. Discarding the beginning and the end allows the batch to fall within the regulatory ceiling for those compounds, which makes the spirit safe to drink.
Second, the heads and the tails, because of the presence of those compounds and a much different ABV percentage, taste different than the rest of the tequila, so different portions are kept or discarded to dial in the desired flavor profile for each brand.
Cambio is one of the very few tequilas that does none of this. They do not separate out heads and tails when making tequila. The stills simply keep running until the blending tank lands at 51% ABV, which is about when the tequila starts to turn too briny.
Cambio’s tequila is within the limits, even with no cuts.
"Since we don’t need to cut, we can make a flavor choice rather than a necessity choice," says des Rosiers.
Why Don’t Tequila Brands Just Say What’s in the Bottle?
All of these production decisions are the foundation of the position des Rosiers has become known for, on tequilas that use additives the regulations clearly permit. He does not additives to be banned. He just wants them declared.
Transparency. That's what I want," he says. "If people want to buy tequila that has sugar inside of it, let them buy it. That's their choice. But just disclose it on the label, and let the people decide what to drink.
Why Cambio Needed the World's Largest French Presses to Create a Coffee-Infused Tequila
des Rosiers does not like coffee liqueurs. Most of them, in his description, are sweet and syrupy and built on coffee concentrate.
He decided to make his own, Poral, a full-strength coffee tequila, based on Cambio’s blanco.
He refused to add more water to Cambio to make the blend work, so he needed a very strong coffee extract to add enough flavor in a small number of milliliters per bottle. No supplier would make one strong enough. So the Cambio team built the equipment themselves.
Two 1,500-liter steel tanks were converted into the world’s largest French coffee presses. A basket holding 500 kilograms of coffee gets lined with custom bags of ground coffee that are four feet across and eight feet tall, lifted 30 feet by a one-ton hoist on a steel rig, and lowered into the tequila.
The coffee is from the Mexican state of Chiapas, roasted light to medium and ground coarser than espresso. First comes a warm infusion, deliberately below boiling because heat in coffee creates bitterness. When finished steeping, this is then pressed and pumped into a chilled second tank. There it cold brews for 40 hours with a second batch of fresh grounds.
Three ingredients go in the bottle: Cambio Blanco, that coffee extract, and cane sugar from the Mexican state of Veracruz. It is bottled unfiltered, and the sediment in the bottom keeps conditioning the flavor for about six weeks after bottling. A decaffeinated version launched this summer.
What Does Cambio Actually Taste Like?
Cambio tastes like a lot of things because, in addition to their flagship lineup of blanco, reposado, and añejo, they have an endless variety of small-batch experiments, each of which has an entirely different flavor profile.
If you want to get a handle on all the ways that tequila can actually taste, Cambio is a terrific brand to take you on a heck of a journey
Two things are true of all three core expressions, and both are unusual. Every one of them is bottled at 46% alcohol by volume, or 92 proof, rather than the standard 40%. And every one of them spends time in French oak wine barrels, the blanco included.
Blanco, $49.99. A blanco that has been in wood at all is already a departure, and Cambio finishes this one in used French oak wine barrels.
Cambio describes it as fruity and rich, with butterscotch, honey-roasted agave, orange peel, guava, and peach over a slight mineral undertone, landing soft on the palate with a clean, lingering finish even at a higher proof.
Reposado, $59.99. One month spent in Burgundy and Bordeaux wine barrels, then five more months in French oak Chardonnay casks, which is a wine-focused barrel program rather than the whiskey-barrel route most reposado tequilas take.
Notes of tropical fruit and white flowers fill the palate, with warm butterscotch, and comforting almond and vanilla, closing on a long, balanced finish of gentle, supportive oak.
Añejo, $69.99. The bottle where the wine-barrel logic goes furthest. It is a blend aged 22 months in second-use toasted French oak Chardonnay barrels, 15 months in first-use un-toasted French oak Chardonnay barrels, and 15 months in used natural-finish cognac casks.
Cambio describes this as toasted grapes and bright floral notes on the palate, deeper roasted agave underneath, with butterscotch and warm spice, and a lingering finish of rich, buttery oak. No barrel char, just light toast or no toast. Very unusual. Learn more about char and toast in our educational feature.
The Cellar Reserve Series, is where the experiments live. Every release is numbered and named, is very small batch, is bottled at cask or still strength with no dilution, is never chill filtered, and is never repeated.
el Desliz, meaning the slip-up, was 1,000 bottles at 49% ABV from four barrels that received a medium toast by mistake and then sat for 15 months.
The Gin Barrel Experiment was 250 bottles aged in rye barrels that had previously held gin. Those rye barrels come from FEW Spirits in Evanston, Illinois, a distillery des Rosiers has carried in his restaurants since it opened.
There are several more Cellar Series releases floating around in good liquor stores, and many more to come.
"These are cool barrels, I know where they come from, I like the stuff that they make, let's go see what happens. The only rules are no heavily charred wood, and nothing that will overpower the spirit.”
Where to Buy Cambio
For bottles online, head to our partners.
OldTownTequila.com has perhaps the deepest Cambio selection anywhere online, carrying all three core expressions plus three of the Cellar Reserve limited releases: el Desliz at $94.99, The Gin Barrel Experiment at $89.99, and a rare El Corazón Blanco at $84.99.
Cambio is also in 12 states in retail and bar/restaurant locations. The Cambio store locator lists the locations in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas.
Poral has its own website at poralcoffee.com.
Where Does Cambio Go From Here?
The first extra añejo from the brand is coming, a blend of three barrel types, and five different ages, averaging somewhere around 40 to 42 months of resting.
The second new project is a 30% ABV version of Portal, in a one-liter bottle designed for bars, built as a direct replacement for the inferior coffee liqueur already sitting in most bar wells.
Cecy des Rosiers finally asked the question, in the middle of one of her husband’s rants about something that could be done better in the tequila business. She exclaimed, “do you ever look at anything and not wonder if it could be better?”
He said no. He can’t help it. See a problem, solve a problem. That’s what change is all about.
Cambio is a presenting partner of The Tequila Report.
About the Author
Jay Baer has spent 30+ years studying tequila and agave spirits. He is the co-founder and editor of The Tequila Report. Jay is also the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, a Hall of Fame keynote speaker, and has spent three decades building and advising brands.
In addition to The Tequila Report, Jay and his business partner, Maddie Jager, are co-founders of Slingshot, an invitation-only community of emerging tequila brands. Jay lives in Bloomington, Indiana and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
You can find him on Instagram.
