Why Bryan Cranston Talked Two Celebrities Out of the Tequila Business

Actor Bryan Cranston has talked two of his famous friends out of starting a spirits brand.

Not because he wanted less competition. Because of what the job actually requires when done correctly.

"I said this is a part-time job for you. There will be times when you have to be away from your family," Cranston says. "And their eyes open up and go, 'Oh my god, it's already so tough to manage that.' And it's like, well, this is what it is. It's not a sign your name, they copy your signature, put it on the label, and now you just wait for a check. It's just not the way it is."

That distinction, between a celebrity who licenses a signature and a celebrity who shows up for the work, is the whole argument over celebrity tequila. Some of these brands are growing. Some are falling apart. The label never tells a shopper which is which.

Cranston and fellow actor and friend Aaron Paul have been working to develop their own agave spirits for six years, beginning with a line of mezcal from Oaxaca. Since May of this year, they've expanded into tequila, and the next project is right around the corner, the launch of Dos Hombres Reposado.

They started by disagreeing about mezcal. Dos Hombres was born of that friction.

The idea came up at dinner in New York roughly three years after Breaking Bad ended, and Paul's explanation of why two friends start a company is more about camaraderie than commerce.

Cranston asked whether it was too early to work together again. Paul suggested spirits, specifically mezcal, his favorite for more than two decades.

"Bryan laughed at me, and I said, 'I'm being serious, man,'" Paul says. "He tried it years and years and years ago, a very terrible mezcal, and he swore it off. So he thought I was crazy."

Paul took him to a mezcal and tequila bar in the East Village that night. That fixed it.

"It did open me up, to make me realize what I must have been missing for all those years," Cranston says. "And that's why, whenever we talk to other makers of tequila or mezcal, we want them to make a great mezcal or a great tequila. Because if they don't, they're going to turn off another generation."

What they could not agree on was intensity. Their descriptions of their own palates are the clearest window into why Dos Hombres tastes the way it does.

"True, I don't mind being slapped around a little bit," Paul says. "Nothing too intense."

"I want to be seduced," Cranston says. "I want my art to open something up for me. When I taste something or eat something or look at architecture, I want to lean in and go, 'Ooh, what is that? Tell me more about this.' I don't want to be assaulted."

That difference of opinion on flavor intensity was made even more obvious during many days of tasting more than 100 mezcals across Oaxaca, before finding the village of San Luis del Río and third-generation maestro mezcalero Gregorio Velasco Luis. Paul describes their mezcal as the Goldilocks zone, right for both of them. The same approach governed the flavor profile of Dos Hombres Tequila.

"If we had similar tastes, I don't know that we would have found the perfect combination of our mezcal and tequila," Cranston says. "We needed to come from two different places to meet in the middle, to make it inviting, to make it rich, with a nice warm finish. And we wanted all of that, but we also had to have it be absolutely pure, with just agave and the spring water."

On tequila, Paul says their flavor disagreement has largely resolved.

"I think now we're in such a great place and our palates are really lined up," he says. "Our main thing from the very beginning was it had to be clean. It had to be pure. We don't want to mess with the artistry."

The one thing neither of them was willing to negotiate was extra ingredients beyond water, agave, and yeast. Cranston says the pitches came anyway.

He appreciates other craft tequila brands that make their products as simply as possible.

"No flavorings, no sweeteners, no glycerin, nothing. Just like ours."

It comes from Tequilera Tap (NOM 1614) in Amatitán, Jalisco in the Valley. The distillery is owned by a collective of agave farmers, which means the people who control the agave supply are the same people running the facility.

The agave is cooked 75% in autoclaves and 25% in traditional brick ovens, then crushed by a roller mill. The water used in distillation comes from a deep volcanic spring in Amatitán.

The new Reposado at 40% ABV is rested three months in first-fill Four Roses bourbon barrels Dos Hombres bought and owns outright. Estimated retail price for the Reposado will be $49.99.

Initially, Dos Hombres announced the Reposado would rest four months in barrel. But the final product hit the optimal flavor profile at three months, according to master distiller, Julio Cova.

Because they use first-fill Four Roses bourbon barrels on their Reposado, they were uncertain exactly how the profile would evolve for this intial batch. Frequent sampling found that "three months was perfect," says Cova, the tequilero who came out of retirement to create Dos Hombres.

Like most master distillers, Cova prefers tequila to taste like agave, not bourbon, and he made certain the Reposado wouldn’t be cloaked in wood and vanilla.

"Because when the raw material is present, the agave, the aromas and the flavors of the agave. I love it," he says. "And it can disappear when aging in barrels. But let me tell you something interesting about this Reposado. We still find the cooked agave. It's still there."

"Four Roses has 10 recipes to produce their bourbons," says Cova. "And these 10 recipes still present the aromas and flavors when the barrel is still first-use. For us, it's brand new for the tequila industry. So we get some aromas and flavors of bourbon, and it comes from 10 different recipes of Four Roses. So the blending of those recipes gives us the interesting final aromas and flavors."

Most brands rest tequila in whatever barrels their distillery already has, which is both a cost decision and a flavor decision, because a barrel gives less every time it is filled. Dos Hombres went the other way, according to Fernando Romero, who runs the brand's Mexico operation.

"We invested in the barrels, so Dos Hombres owns all these first-fill barrels," Romero says. "The idea, as we grow with this category, is to keep securing and purchasing more first-fill barrels. So we're not using the distillery's barrels for this Reposado. This was a specific project and purchase that we did separately."

Paul's answer starts with the balance sheet.

"This was all self-funded at the very beginning. It wasn't a company that came to us," he says. Dos Hombres has raised outside money in multiple rounds since, but the founders' arrangement has not changed. "Bryan and I, we don't take a salary. Everything just goes back into the company. We have hopes to one day make money, but we're doing this because we really believe in what we're doing."

They also still hire everyone in the company, personally.

In Cranston's telling, being famous contributes almost nothing on its own.

"The one thing that we know, when we were struggling actors, and both of us were, is that it all depends on how much time and energy and passion you're willing to put in the job," Cranston says. "There's no fairy dust to make something successful. It's how many hours are you willing and able to put toward something."

The distribution side has reached the same conclusion, and acted on it.

"Southern Glazer's, our distributor, is so wary that they now put celebrities through a vetting process," he says, "because they don't want to invest time and energy and money on taking on something and it just turns out to sit in the corner of their warehouse."

"Anyone can sell a bottle of your booze to a liquor store, and it sits on the shelf," Cranston says. "The real challenge is to sell the second bottle and the third bottle and the fourth one, so that it doesn't stay on the shelf. That's the challenge we present to ourselves."

In Mexico, Romero says the founders' fame functions as pressure rather than a shortcut. "Because we get much attention towards our operations, I think that keeps us in very high standards."

Mostly, slow down. New research from The Tequila Report, a census-weighted survey of 1,000 American tequila drinkers, found that two-thirds of them never drink tequila neat. Cranston has clearly met some of them.

"We will have kids going, 'Come on, shots, shots, shots,' and it's like, no, no, no," he says. "I'm not interested in getting drunk. I'm interested in exploring this beautiful spirit. Drinking something quick, that's when you have to take bad tasting medicine. But man, I just cringe when someone just shoots down our product."

His prescription is specific. Try it neat first, then one big ice cube, swirled and sipped, because the texture changes. Build a cocktail after that if a cocktail is what you want, and stay away from the mixes.

"Those really super sweet margaritas, to me, are like junk food. You're feeding sugar just like you would feed salt. Too much salt, too much sugar. It's junk food, and it's not good for anyone," Cranston says.

"What we can do, if someone's interested, is help them, guide them toward this," he says. "It's no different than when I do theater and people have never been to the theater. It's like, ooh, come try it out. See what it's like. And you may not like it. It may be the love of your life. You never know. So it's to not make them wrong. That's the point. Don't make the consumer wrong in what they like. Just give them an opportunity to find alternatives."

Neither of them drinks tequila neat exclusively, however. Paul leans toward a tequila and mezcal negroni, or a penicillin. Cranston likes a paloma depending on the season, and a bloody Maria in place of a bloody Mary, which he says will end anyone's relationship with vodka.

The brand's position is that a tequila has to stand up without help, which sets a high bar for a Valley profile at 40% ABV.

My Dos Hombres Blanco review on The Tequila Report suggests the nose is assertive, loaded with minerals, white pepper, and earthiness, clearly a Valley tequila with the backbone that comes with it.

The palate is gravelly, with a small vegetal note, a dose of citrus that isn't present on the nose, and a sweetness that arrives last.

Smaller bottles first. Romero says 375 ml and 50 ml formats for both the Blanco and the Reposado are in production and targeted for this fall, which tracks with the category, where small formats have become one of the fastest-growing package segments in spirits and 50 ml and 375 ml agave bottles have racked up big sales gains.

Cranston has an unusual reason to want bigger bottles, as well.

"Because I do a lot of theater in New York and doing the Broadway houses, I pitched all the Broadway theaters, and they're asking, 'Hey, can you make these in liter bottles [for the bar]?'" he says.

Cova, like many master distillers, prefers tequila bottled at higher strength, arguing the aromas and flavors are simply more powerful there. Both founders have now tasted a barrel-proof sample of their Blanco, and Romero says the team is working through options.

"We're definitely going to do a small batch run of an incredibly high proof," Paul says. "People need to experience it."

But six years into the Dos Hombres project, the thing Paul keeps returning to is not a bottle. It is a water plant.

Dos Hombres Mezcal is made in the village of San Luis del Río, where a single landline on a hook is the only phone service for all. The brand asked the town what it needed, and the answer was clean drinking water. The brand built a new filtration plant for the area, and paved a 50 km road.

Paul remembers the water plant christening, with the Mezcalero Velasco walking down the center of the street in his Sunday best beside a priest, the whole village behind them.

Dos Hombres is a presenting partner of The Tequila Report.