The Complete Ultimate List of Craft Tequila Brands

Picture this.

You are standing in front of a wall of tequila, phone in hand, trying to figure out which bottle is worth your money. Our reporting finds there are roughly 900 real, buyable tequila brands in the United States right now, a number that keeps climbing. The shelf in front of you holds a few dozen of them, and the labels give you almost no information.

More drinkers than ever want to know who makes their tequila and how. And those questions have been hard to answer for a while now.

For the last five years or so, the sorting mechanism has primarily been additives.

That conversation was valuable. It taught people to think more about how tequila is made. But as a sorting tool, it is both incomplete and inconsistent. No comprehensive, current list of additive-free tequilas has been built and maintained for some time. And given that the Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT), the category’s sole regulator, actively opposes the additive-free premise, no official version is coming.

And the conversation needs to expand either way. Not away from additives, but past them, toward a broader and more useful way to consider tequila: CRAFT.

The diffuser is the clearest dividing line between artisanal and industrial agave processing, and its use is the single fastest way to strip character out of a spirit at scale.

These are commonly called “additives,” although in reality, abocantes and additives differ in terms of tequila production standards. To be clear, to be on The Tequila Report Craft Tequila Brands list, the brand says it does not use the additives, sweeteners, colors, and flavors that the regulations say are allowable up to 1% by weight.

The brand sells fewer than 300,000 bottles in a six-month period in Nielsen-scanned accounts. Above that, a brand has taken the leap to intensely scaled production, which can change how the tequila is made.

Any one of those criteria alone tells you something. Together they capture what most people actually mean when they say “craft”: a spirit made with a level of care that industrial throughput makes difficult.

Because craft has always meant scale as much as method, and the clearest precedent is beer.

The Brewers Association, a trade body for American brewers, defines a craft brewer as small and independent. Small means annual production of 6 million barrels or less. Independent means less than 25% owned or controlled by a larger alcohol company that is not itself a craft brewer. Notably, the association retired its “traditional” production-method requirement in 2018, leaving a definition anchored on size and ownership.

This list borrows the logic and adjusts it for tequila. It keeps a hard volume ceiling, the way beer does. It adds back the method test that beer dropped, in the form of the diffuser rule, because in agave spirits, how you cook and extract still defines the product. Independence was considered as a fourth requirement, and set aside, though the size ceiling ends up excluding most conglomerate-owned brands anyway.

Drawing the line at 300,000 bottles over six months was a judgment call that was carefully examined and considered before we implemented it.

The absence of abocantes/additives is self-reported. Each brand here claims it does not use additives. Those claims have not been independently verified, because verifying them is close to impossible, operationally and legally. There is no functioning test-and-certify pathway a journalist can rely on at this scale.

The CRT is the sole authority for tequila, and it does not have, nor does it want, a verification process for abocante use. Abocantes are legal. Brands who do not use them are making a production choice, the same way that American oak vs. French oak is a production choice.

Using abocantes does not make a tequila bad. But making excellent tequila without them requires a level of mastery, and that mastery is part of what this list identifies.

A media publication like The Tequila Report is entitled to describe and categorize. It is journalism, not confirmation or accreditation. That is the CRT’s job. Our job is to teach people about tequila and help them make decisions.

To reiterate. This is NOT A LAB RESULT. IT IS NOT CERTIFIED. It is a rigorously researched editorial list built on information provided BY BRANDS THEMSELVES.

The brands below meet all three criteria: no industrial diffuser, a self-declared absence of additives or abocantes, and fewer than 300,000 bottles sold in Nielsen-scanned accounts over a six-month period in 2026.

The list is alphabetical, and intentionally so. It carries no NOM numbers, regions, or categories, because NOM numbers change hands, and a list meant to be accurate over time should not anchor itself to details that can shift.

When and if brands change distilleries or production approaches, their inclusion in this list will, of course, be reevaluated.

There are 232 brands in this edition of the craft tequila list.

Inclusion on this list is not just an entry on this page. It comes with two things no brand outside the list may use.

The first is the official Tequila Report Craft Tequila icon. Listed brands are allowed to display it on their sites, their social channels, and their marketing.

Again, this icon does not indicate CONFIRMATION of any kind whatsoever. It only indicates that a brand was included in this craft tequila list, created by a media company. It is no different than appearing in the Michelin Guide, and being able to use that logo.

The second item brands receive is the Craft Tequila Credential. It’s a consistent transparency instrument, built to disclose a tequila’s ingredients and production process in one standardized layout: distillery and NOM, master distiller, agave source and region, water, cooking method, crushing, fermentation, yeast, distillation, aging, and bottling. Every listed brand is encouraged to publish it on their website, social media, and beyond.

The value is in the consistency. A shared format, used across many brands, becomes something a consumer can recognize, compare, and rely upon.

The hope is that the credential becomes a standard, like ingredients labeling on foods in the United States.

If a brand is on the list and hasn’t heard from our team about the icon and the credential, please reach out here.

New brands arrive often, so some that may belong here almost certainly are not here yet. That is a limitation of our ability to monitor all brands, not their suitability.

An enormous amount of time went into making this list correct and comprehensive. Plenty of incomplete tequila lists live online. None of them were built with this approach or this rigor.

If a brand believes it meets all three criteria, please contact us here. Every submission will be reviewed, and qualifying brands will be added at the next publication of the list, before the end of the year.

Thank you for your interest in craft tequila. We hope you find this list helpful.