What You’ll Learn:
Why starting a tequila brand is easy, and why LEÓN y SOL wasn't.
How a night with Clase Azul's founder pulled a tech founder into agave.
What maestro Jose Aceves builds inside the distillery.
Why their alcohol-free NeQuilaTM is made the slow, expensive way, not engineered in a lab.
How a music-world equity partner unlocks doors young brands rarely find.
Starting a tequila brand in 2026 is easy.
You do not need a distillery. You do not need agave. You do not even need to know how any of it works.
You need money, a contract distillery, and a label designer. Do that, and you can have a bottle on a shelf within a year.
That is why there are more than 2,000 registered tequila brands, many of them created on the fly like microwave popcorn.
Bobby Marhamat had the money to build LEÓN y SOL the easy way. He chose the hard way instead.
At nearly every fork, he took the slower, more natural, more expensive route. Here’s why.
Why Would a Tech Entrepreneur Start a Tequila Brand?
Marhamat did not need a new career.
Bobby Marhamat. Photo courtesy of LEÓN y SOL.
He spent 23 years in restaurant and hospitality technology, with three exits and CEO roles at companies like Revel Systems and Raydiant. Tequila was not on his list of businesses to attempt.
His father trained as a civil engineer but loved hospitality. So he bought struggling restaurants and moved the family to the Midwest. In that life, where keeping the restaurants going is constantly on the minds of everyone in the family, Marhamat says you barely see your dad.
"That is the DNA of LEÓN y SOL." he said. And it’s why the brand’s tagline is, "For People Who Show Up." It points straight back to the work ethic he watched his immigrant parents exhibit every day.
Many years later, tequila found Marhamat.
At The Battery, a private club in San Francisco, Marhamat sat next to the founder of the pioneering luxury tequila Clase Azul and got his whole story. Not the pitch. The life's work behind it.
"That night ignited something under me," he said. "I did not walk out with a business plan. I walked out knowing I was going to build something."
He also refused to hide where he came from, even though it offers no edge in this category. LEÓN y SOL translates to the lion and the sun, one of the oldest symbols of Persian identity. A first-generation Persian-American naming a Highlands tequila after a Persian icon is not an obvious tequila hook, and Marhamat knows it. He kept it anyway.
"I did not want to pretend to be something I am not," he said. "I am a Persian American making tequila with a Mexican family that has done this for generations, and the brand is honest about both sides of that story."
That instinct, to not fake the easy version of things, turns out to be the ethos of LEÓN y SOL.
What Happens Inside Casa Tequilera de Arandas?
The hard way starts with being intentional about where you make the tequila.
LEÓN y SOL is produced at Casa Tequilera de Arandas, NOM 1499, in the Jalisco Highlands. It is the same distillery behind Mijenta and Comisario.
Marhamat remembers his first visit by its smell. "The first thing that hits you is the smell of piña, the cooked agave in the air," he said. "You can tell within ten minutes whether a distillery treats tequila as a product or as a craft, and this was craft."
The person building the liquid is Jose Aceves, a third-generation maestro tequilero. He is the main reasons to take LEÓN y SOL seriously as a tequila consumer.
Marhamat met him through an industry friend who swore the two shared the same values. What sealed it was that Aceves does not agree to be agreeable.
"That is exactly why I wanted him," Marhamat said. "When a third-generation maestro tequilero challenges your assumptions, you listen, because he is protecting the liquid. Every debate we have had has made the tequila better."
The agave is cooked in autoclaves, extracted with a roller mill, fermented in open stainless steel tanks, and distilled in a stainless pot still fitted with a copper coil.
Two finishing steps shape the profile. Aeration opens the spirit and softens the alcohol edge, so cooked agave and citrus come forward. Cold filtering pulls heavier congeners for a cleaner finish without stripping the Highlands character.
Harvesting agave at Casa Tequilera de Arandas. Photo courtesy of the distillery.
Marhamat insists there are no artificial ingredients in the bottle, and nothing hiding behind sweeteners or oak tricks. "We deliver what tastes right in the glass. Smooth is easy to fake. Balance you have to earn in production."
Can a Tequila Really Be a "Lifestyle Movement"?
Marhamat calls LEÓN y SOL a lifestyle movement. He also says the liquid has to come first.
"If the tequila in the bottle does not stand on its own, blind tasted against the best in the category, then 'lifestyle movement' is just noise, and consumers see through it in one sip."
Start there, he argues, and the culture becomes fair game.
His proof is Sol Hour. It began as an internal ritual and turned into something guests now host themselves. "You do not host a party, you throw a Sol Hour."
Sol Hour, featuring the brand’s signature cocktail, Sol y Soda. Photo courtesy of LEÓN y SOL
The brand built a Sol Hour app so a host can run the music and mood from a phone, with guests scanning a QR code to request songs. "When your brand creates a ritual that people adopt as their own, that is not marketing over liquid. That is the liquid creating culture."
The brand’s signature matte black bottles also make a big statement about not fitting in to the “typical tequila” stereotype.
A Music Empire Bet on the Bottle, Not a Celebrity
A young tequila brand does not usually land a culture-and-distribution powerhouse as a partner. LEÓN y SOL did.
EMPIRE, the independent music and distribution company known for launching and scaling artists on its own terms, took an equity stake in LEÓN y SOL and signed a multi-year deal in 2024.
Marhamat draws the line that matters to tequila drinkers. This is not a celebrity renting out a name. "It is a culture and distribution engine partnering with a liquid they actually believe in," he said.
It started organically. He met Moody Jones, who leads EMPIRE's dance division, and Jones loved the product before he heard the pitch. Jones introduced him to founder and CEO Ghazi Shami. The two clicked as builders, both independent, both, in Marhamat's words, "obsessed with culture over hype."
The partnership opens doors a young brand cannot open alone. LEÓN y SOL is building distribution in Nigeria, a top EMPIRE market where premium spirits culture is growing fast and tequila is still emerging.
At home, the strategy is depth over breadth, and it follows the same do-it-right logic as everything else. In Miami, a partnership with Tequila Town placed the brand in more than 25 venues at once.
"A bartender recommending your blanco in a paloma does more than any billboard."
Does the Hard Way Pay Off?
All of that discipline only matters if the tequila is good. And Marhamat has specific thoughts about what LEÓN y SOL should be.
“Transparency is not a marketing angle for us. It is table stakes,” he states. “Tequila made from 100 percent agave should taste like agave, not like vanilla extract and glycerin.”
“For us,” he says, “the goal is a blanco you can sip neat and a reposado where the barrel supports the agave rather than burying it.”
So far, thoughtful drinkers agree that it’s working. LEÓN y SOL took a Gold for their Blanco at the 2026 Agavos Awards, and received high marks in a review here at The Tequila Report, as well.
The LEÓN y SOL lineup
Drawing on floral notes born from the fertile soils of Los Altos, this tequila is just as at home on the rocks as it is in your signature margarita.
Plush and silky in the mouth. Slight sweetness, especially at first, followed by notes of rosemary and thyme, cooked agave, and pear.
It has a playful freshness with bold and ripe aromas, and a zingy yet floral citrus finish.
The Reposado rests ~4 months in oak and pours a clean, amber-yellow with a golden sparkle.
The nose is cooked agave and caramel, leaning fruity and woody, with a note of coffee. The palate has good body, with coffee and caramel out front, subtly reminiscent of a cappuccino. The finish is slightly sweet and lightly woody.
It’s on the lighter, brighter side of the reposado scale, closer to butterscotch than caramel.
LEÓN y SOL is all about doing things the hard way, and perhaps the biggest evidence of that approach is not a tequila at all.
NeQuilaTM is a non-alcoholic agave spirit. And nobody has ever made one like this.
Most zero-proof agave products are built up from agave juice and flavoring. They engineer a faded approximation, like making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.
LEÓN y SOL starts with a real tequila base and carefully removes the alcohol.
"It is harder, slower, and more expensive," Marhamat said, "and it is worth it because the character of the spirit, the cooked agave, the pepper, the minerality, is already in the liquid."
His analogy: "It is the difference between decaf made from real coffee and a coffee-flavored drink." Because of regulatory standards, it is of course classified as a 100% agave juice beverage, not tequila.
The idea came from the hospitality world, not a marketing focus group. Marhamat runs bar venues and closely watches the beverage menus.
"The fastest growing part of the beverage world is zero proof, and it is not driven by people who do not drink. It is driven by people who drink less but refuse to drink worse." The guest ordering a NeQuilaTM on Tuesday, he says, is the same one ordering the reposado on Saturday.
NeQuilaTM gives all the bold character, depth, and natural benefits of blue agave, without the buzz.
What is LEÓN y SOL Still Trying to Get Right?
The thing Marhamat says he is still working on is restraint. That is a strange confession from a software operator trained to scale fast.
"The demand signals tell us to go faster, and my instinct as an operator is to say yes to everything," he said. The discipline is saying no to new geographical markets before the brand can support them with real marketing and training.
"The brands that flame out in this category are not the ones that grew too slow." He credits the three-tier system for the lesson. "You cannot growth hack a distributor."
Five years from now, his ambition is specific. He wants LEÓN y SOL to be the answer when someone asks for a tequila that is both honest and interesting, with NeQuilaTM being a big part of that story.
Most of all, he wants people to know the names behind it. The Aceves family in Jalisco. And his own family's story, one that started by saving a set of failing Nebraska restaurants.
That is where the brand began. A table, a family, and a decision to do the hard work, every time.
"Five years from now, when someone says For People Who Show Up, I want the response to be a knowing nod and a pour.
LEÓN y SOL is a 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.
