How Did G4 Tequila Spend 10 Years Becoming an Overnight Sensation?

G4 Tequila is now one of the 25 best-selling tequila brands in the United States by Nielsen data. It is one of the fastest-growing brands in the category. It is the number 2 brand overall in The Tequila Report's Top 150.

Ten years ago, almost nobody wanted it.

G4 comes from Destilería El Pandillo (NOM 1579), which opened in 2010 in Jesús María, in the Highlands of Jalisco. The distillery is family-owned by Felipe Camarena and his sons, Luis Felipe and Alan. G4 stands for fourth generation, and the sons are it. Camarena himself is the third. G4 is the distillery's house brand, meaning the flagship, made and owned by the same family that runs the facility.

The name on the door carries weight, too. Felipe is the brother of Carlos Camarena, co-founder of Tequila Ocho and the longtime master distiller at La Alteña, home of Tapatío and El Tesoro. Their grandfather founded that distillery in 1937. In tequila terms, this family is close to royalty.

None of which helped G4 much at first.

The brand first shipped to the United States in 2014. By late 2015 it had been on American shelves for a year and had gone just about nowhere.

That’s when a Chicago digital marketing agency got pulled in.

Shawn Miller and Jeff Ernst ran that agency, which worked mostly with food companies. Ernst had also built a software company, which kept him around financiers, and one of those relationships led him to an investor involved with a small Highlands tequila brand that needed marketing help.

Ernst said yes, without knowing much at all about tequila.

That agency eventually became PKGD Group, and today Ernst and Miller are its co-founders. PKGD imports and markets G4 in the United States, as well as other agave spirits brands, handling compliance, logistics, marketing, brand development, warehousing, and distributor relationships in all 50 states.

Miller’s title is Chief Right Brain. Ernst is Chief Left Brain. Before G4, neither had ever imported a bottle of anything.

"Jeff really deserves the credit for what happened next," Miller says. "Originally, we weren't brought in to build an import company. We were simply trying to help an extraordinary tequila producer tell his story."

The producer was Camarena. The first impression of him was neither warm nor fuzzy.

"People sometimes assume we became instant friends, but honestly, my first impression was that Felipe was intimidating," Miller says. "He's open and funny once you know him, but he's incredibly serious about his work."

Camarena worked at the family distillery, La Alteña, then left to build his own at El Pandillo.

Camarena’s intent was, and is, clear. He was not chasing attention. He was chasing quality. Trained as an engineer, he had the mechanical and process background to go after it in ways most tequileros could not.

Then the original G4 sales organization shifted, and Miller and Ernst were asked to take on sales in addition to importation. These are very different roles. Ernst said yes again.

"We didn't go looking for tequila, and we certainly didn't go looking for G4," Miller says. "It really was a happy accident. Looking back ten years later, it changed all of our lives."

Given its success, most consumers assume G4 exploded on the tequila scene. It did not.

"Initially, people thought the bottle was too simple. They didn't understand the name," Miller says. "The most common comment we heard was that G4 didn't look or sound Mexican enough."

That says a lot about how tequila was marketed a decade ago.

G4 arrived with no story on the label. No origin myth. It arrived with Camarena's philosophy, repeated for years: he is not in the business of making fancy bottles, he is in the business of making great tequila.

It was a hard sell, in a category where luxury packaging often does the selling for you, especially in those years.

"The interesting part is that we couldn't market our way around those first impressions," Miller says. "The tequila had to do the work."

It did, one pour at a time. Retailers who tasted it recommended it. Bartenders who poured it kept pouring it. Consumers who bought a bottle at a fair price told other people.

That word of mouth compounded for years before the sales data caught up.

"Looking back, I don't think PKGD changed the brand," Miller says. "I think consumers gradually caught up to what Felipe had already built."

Camarena and his sons do. PKGD does not own it. No outside spirits company owns it.

That puts G4 in a very small percentage of tequila brands still owned by the family that produces them. If Miller could get one fact in front of every G4 drinker, it is this one.

"The person making the decisions is the same person whose name, reputation, and family's future are attached to every bottle," Miller says. "Those aren't decisions being made for a quarterly earnings report. They're decisions being made for the next generation."

The control that being producer-owned provides doesn't inherently mean the tequila is great, however.

"It doesn't automatically mean everyone will prefer the taste of G4. Taste is personal, and the tequila still has to earn that. But I absolutely believe ownership influences decisions, and those decisions influence what's in the bottle," Miller suggests.

Start with agave, where the honest answer is that G4 has outgrown its own land. Production once came entirely from Camarena's ranches. Then largely from family-owned ranches. Today G4 sources mature agave from across the Jesús María area, bought to Camarena's specifications.

"At G4's current scale, exclusive estate-grown production simply isn't realistic," Miller says, "and Felipe has never wanted to pretend otherwise."

Cooking happens in traditional stone ovens. Four new ovens were recently built, tripling the distillery's oven capacity. Agave cooks for roughly 22 hours, then cools before the ovens open, so the full cycle is about one-and-a-half days. Steam enters from both the top and the bottom, for a more even roast than the industry norm of steaming from one direction.

Milling is where G4 splits in two, depending on where the tequila is headed.

Cooked agave first meets Igor, a shredder assembled from old semi-tractor and railroad car parts. Every G4 blanco then runs through Felipestein, Camarena's custom mechanical tahona, built from repurposed industrial scrap including a reclaimed steamroller drum, railroad car axles, and a small electric motor.

Felipestein was built for efficiency, not for the story.

"We wanted a more efficient alternative given that the traditional tahona wheel stone has a very reduced surface area, and it usually takes an entire work shift to process a load of fibre," Camarena told Decanter. "We wanted to stick as close as possible to the artisanal process by avoiding overly industrial methods."

A new, custom-designed roller mill extracts juices from agave that is destined for barrels, meaning the reposado and the añejo.

Across every expression in the lineup, fermentation uses an agave yeast culture propagated from Camarena's grandfather. The standard bottlings ferment primarily in open-air stainless steel tanks. G4 Blanco de Madera ferments in wooden vats with the fibers, which is most of why it tastes different. Distillation of all G4 is twice through copper pot stills.

Water gets treated as an ingredient here, not a utility, and there are three options. The standard blanco is proofed with 53% rainwater captured on the ranch and 47% spring water. The Blanco 108, the reposado, and the añejo run a 50/50 mix of spring and rainwaters. Blanco de Madera uses deep well water, exclusively.

Aging is deliberately restrained. Camarena describes resting his aged tequila rather than aging it, so the agave is not buried under wood. The current reposado averages about three months in ex-bourbon barrels new to G4's program.

"When people ask what makes G4 different, I don't think the answer is any machine," Miller says. "It's thousands of thoughtful decisions made by someone who has been thinking about tequila his entire life."

And occasionally, one of those decisions arrives by accident.

In December 2024, G4 released a batch of blanco labeled Lot 12B. It did not taste like the blanco people expected.

A portion of wood-fermented tequila had ended up in the blend. Miller is direct about how: a happy accident that produced an unexpectedly good result.

The easy move was to ship it quietly and let drinkers wonder. Instead PKGD explained exactly what had happened.

Consumers loved it.

Within roughly 90 days, Camarena made it permanent. The standard G4 Blanco recipe now includes approximately 6% wood-fermented tequila. Not as a limited curiosity. As the recipe.

He tasted the accident and decided it made the tequila better. The brand's best-selling bottle changed for good because one batch went sideways in an interesting direction, and because nobody tried to hide it.

It may return, eventually, but at present no new G4 Extra Añejo is being released.

Total barrel capacity is currently committed to reposado and añejo. Until Camarena has enough properly matured stock to meet his standard, no extra añejo gets bottled.

"That's frustrating sometimes," Miller says. "But if a G4 bottle exists, it should exist because Felipe believed it was ready. If it doesn't exist, we're comfortable telling people that."

PKGD has recently started putting a name on that arrangement: Built Right, Brought Right. The phrase is new. The practice is not.

Miller or Ernst travels to El Pandillo every month, carrying market information: what consumers are asking for, where demand is building, which accounts are running dry. Camarena then decides what can actually be produced without compromising the tequila.

"There have been plenty of times when demand exceeded what El Pandillo could responsibly produce," Miller says. "It would have been easy to source tequila somewhere else or take shortcuts just to keep every SKU available. We haven't done that."

The approach got its hardest test over the roller mill.

Enthusiasts had become attached to the Felipestein story. When the roller mill went in to add capacity, plenty of people advised PKGD to simply not mention it.

"We took the opposite approach," Miller says. "We showed it. We filmed it. We explained why Felipe chose it, how it worked, and what impact it might have on the finished tequila."

Very few tasters could identify the difference in the glass. Identifying it was never the objective.

"The point was that it was true. If it's true, we talk about it."

Camarena's philosophy is that tequila has three ingredients, agave, water, and yeast, and nothing else belongs in it.

Across the lineup that produces a recognizable house character. Cooked agave up front. Black pepper. Minerality. A clean finish that does not lean on wood or sweetness to be likable.

G4 Blanco is the reference point and the volume driver, at 40% ABV. The brand's notes describe cooked agave and black pepper with subtle vanilla and oak on the nose, then soft florals, citrus, butterscotch, and cinnamon. Clean, crisp, silky, and now carrying that 6% of wood-fermented tequila underneath.

G4 108 is the same blanco DNA at still strength, 54% ABV, and The Tequila Report scored it 91. The nose is more muted than the proof suggests, refined and almost elegant, with more minerality than most bottles from this distillery. The palate is signature G4: black pepper and earthiness on top, citrus and herbaceousness underneath, with a cinnamon-spiced burn that never turns objectionable. At 108 proof for what many brands charge at 80, it is one of the better values in overproof tequila.

G4 Blanco de Madera is the outlier, and the highest-scoring G4 at The Tequila Report at 92 points. Wooden-vat fermentation with fibers, deep well water, and 45% ABV build something fuller than the standard blanco. Cooked agave, light smokiness, baking spices, and citrus on the nose lead into sweet cooked agave, light pepper, cinnamon, and a rounding minerality. Madera is Spanish for wood.

G4 Blanco Clásico is a different animal built from the same parts. Very ripe agave for extra-high sugar content, 10% wooden fermentation, and a 50/50 split of rainwater and spring water. The 2025 release sold through completely, and Camarena may create another version in 2026, if he deems a batch to be worthy of the designation.

If you’re keeping track, that’s four blancos. And that can create a communication problem.

"A consumer might walk into a store and see the original G4 Blanco, G4 108, Blanco de Madera, and G4 Clásico sitting next to one another," Miller says. "To someone who knows G4, those are four very different experiences. To someone discovering the brand for the first time, they may simply look like four Blancos."

"These aren't products created because someone decided the portfolio needed another SKU. They exist because Felipe discovered something he believed was worth sharing."

G4 Reposado scored 90 and is now available in 49 U.S. states, with Alaska coming soon. Cooked agave, baking spices, and light citrus on the nose, then a subtly complex palate of cooked agave, minerality, citrus, light vanilla, and cinnamon, closing clean and long. 40% ABV.

G4 Añejo also scored 90, and it is a deliberate contrast to most añejos. Oak, vanilla, agave, and cherry open the nose, joined by cinnamon, minerals, and white pepper. The palate stays genuinely agave-forward, with vanilla, pepper, citrus, cherry cola, and butterscotch fading into honey, mint, and apple. At 40% ABV, it is also very hard to find, since G4 receives roughly one truckload per quarter and it sells through almost immediately.

The metric Miller watches most closely is not distribution or availability in every state. It is reorder rate (velocity, in industry parlance).

"It's how much G4 sells after it gets there," he says. "Are people coming back for another bottle? Are retailers reordering? Are bartenders continuing to pour it?"

Even as G4 has landed in more accounts, sales per location have kept rising.

"It's one thing to become available in more places," Miller says. "It's another thing to become wanted in more places."

Asked about the next decade, he mostly describes not breaking anything.

"Our job isn't to become more important than the producers we represent. Our job is to help more people discover remarkable tequila and to make sure that what Felipe creates reaches consumers without being distorted along the way."

Ten years ago, two guys from a Chicago marketing agency walked into a distillery in Jesús María knowing nothing. They got told the bottle was too plain and the name was wrong.

The bottle is still plain. The name still means what it always meant, and the generation it names is still coming.

"When you pick up a bottle of G4, you're holding the accumulated judgment of four generations of tequila makers in your hand," Miller says.

The tequila did the work. It just took ten years for everyone else to notice.

G4 is a presenting partner of The Tequila Report.