Drink Tequila That Tastes Like Tequila, Says This Master Distiller

On this episode of Legends & Legacies, we sit down with René Carranza, maestro tequilero of Atanasio, made at Familia Landeros (NOM 1599) in San Pedro de los Landeros, a small community in the Valles region just northwest of the town of Tequila.

We asked him six questions across two short interviews. Three about how he got here, three about where he's taking Atanasio next.

One answer is the reason this piece exists. When asked what he would change about tequila if he could travel back in time, Carranza didn't name a person or a place. He named a decision, and he said that decision turned tequila into a commodity.

Here is the whole conversation, with the context around it.

We opened with the simplest question we ask everyone in this series: what was your first passion, before tequila?

Then he got specific about which kind of artist.

That answer is worth more than the usual charming-origin-story slot, for two reasons.

First, Carranza is not an heir. The distillery belongs to the Landeros family, agave farmers who built it in 1995 to turn agave nobody would buy into distillate. René came in later, when the company was formalized in 2011 and brought on partners, and he now runs production as its maestro tequilero. Nothing about his career was inherited or inevitable.

Second, he still talks about the liquid the way a musician talks about a song rather than the way an operator talks about inventory. That distinction turns out to be the whole interview.

Our second question was the one we ask every guest: if you could go back in time, what would you change about tequila?

Most answers involve a distillery someone wishes they'd seen, or a relative they wish they'd met. Carranza asked for a seat in a very different kind of room.

He is describing a specific historical choice: as tequila went from a Mexican regional spirit to a global one, the category made the product easier for unfamiliar drinkers to like.

His position is that the adjustment ran the wrong way.

Strip the politeness out and that is an argument for a smaller category.

It means no reformulating toward a softer, sweeter, more neutral profile. It means fewer converts, slower growth, and a lot of people deciding tequila isn't for them. René's view is that the category should have accepted that fate and kept the original flavor profile intact.

Then he went further than most people in his position will go on-the-record.

A commodity competes on price, availability, and marketing, because buyers treat one unit as interchangeable with the next. Carranza is saying tequila was reshaped until the liquid itself stopped being the reason most people choose a bottle.

Certainly, recent years have seen many new tequila brands created, and older brands modified, to present a softer and sweeter flavor profile. This is thought to be more popular among newer tequila consumers, and especially favored among American drinkers.

The tequila rulebook has always allowed for the use of "mellowing agents” or “abocantes” - often called “additives” in English. This is conceptually correct, as the maker is “adding” something to the tequila beyond water, agave, and yeast. However, in the regulatory standards an “additive” is not the same as an “abocante”.

Regardless, these mellowing agents may be used "to soften the flavor of the Tequila," using caramel coloring, natural oak extract, glycerin, or sugar-based syrup. The rule caps those agents at one percent of the tequila's total weight before bottling and requires producers to keep records of what they used. That one percent does not have to appear on the label, which is one of the core friction points in that debate.

But Carranza’s point is that just because the levers to make tequila softer, sweeter, and more familiar have been in the standard for a long time, doesn’t mean they should be used.

Then we narrowed the same question to his own brand: what would you change about Atanasio?

He mostly refused the premise.

Then he offered exactly one thing, and it's a surprising one.

Here's what he's referring to, because the timeline isn't obvious from the answer.

The Landeros distillery went up in 1995, but it wasn't certified to produce tequila. What it made in the early years was an agave distillate sold under a different framing. The company was formalized in 2011. The distillery didn't hold certification to produce tequila until 2017, which is also when the Atanasio brand as we know it was created.

So for years, Carranza was making a spirit from cooked blue Weber agave in the Valley region that he could not call by the word that would have sold it.

And that puts him in an unusual position. He believes the category gave away its character to win the world, and his single professional regret is that he spent years standing outside that category and wants those years back.

He isn't against tequila. He objects to what he thinks was traded to get it where it is today.

Before he answered our first question about the future, Carranza sang a line of a love song into the camera.

He then says Atanasio is not innovating, and he means that as a compliment.

If commoditization is the charge he laid out earlier, this is his answer to it. Not new invention, but recovery of methods the category left behind when it industrialized.

Plenty of producers talk about tradition. Carranza named two specific projects he’s working rolling out to bring Atanasio further back toward tequila’s past.

The oven. Atanasio currently cooks its agave in a small autoclave, a pressurized steel vessel that gets the job done in a matter of hours.

The family has now built a brick oven for longer, more traditional cooking. Brick ovens, or hornos, are masonry chambers that cook agave slowly with steam over a much longer stretch. Using one instead of an autoclave is a distillery deliberately choosing a slower, more labor-intensive process.

The fibers. When agave is crushed, the sugary liquid is normally separated from the crushed plant material, the fiber known as bagazo. Fermenting and distilling with that fiber left in is the older approach, and it carries more of the plant’s essence into the finished spirit.

On Atanasio's US-exclusive Orígenes "Fibras y Fuego", most of the blend ferments without fibers, while a small micro-batch is fermented and twice distilled with the fibers still packed into an eight-liter pot, heated over open flame, then blended back in.

Carranza’s summary of his direction is this:

We asked how Atanasio's past shapes its future. His answer was mostly a list of things he doesn't want the brand to do.

Notice that "I do not want us to focus on reaching everyone" is the same argument he made about 1990s tequila, now aimed at his own brand. He's holding Atanasio to the standard he wishes the category had held itself to.

Our last question was about goals.

Carranza believes tequila sold its taste to reach the world. He's betting a small distillery in San Pedro de los Landeros can reach you without doing that.