Why Does This Brand Stop Making Tequila Half of the Year?

Todd Bottorff purchased 12 simple glass bottles, wrapped each one in the same color paper, and added numbers to them.

In the room, Todd and his brother Chad were surrounded by an enthusiastic crowd of tequila aficionados who serve it, sell it, craft it, and absolutely adore it. The mission was straightforward: taste and rank these 12 tequilas, all sampled blindly.

The answers to this test split cleanly into two groups.

One group went for the loudest samples in the lineup, the profile Todd Bottorff associates with makers like Fortaleza and Don Fulano. "That flavor profile is a little bit more aggressive in what it delivers to you," he says. "It's just got a lot of punch."

That group, he says, was mostly the diehards.

The second group was bigger. It featured mostly women, as well as people who like tequila but aren’t collectors. This segment of testers kept putting the same bottle at the front, one without the big, bold flavor profile.

That sample came from Melly Barajas, a distiller working in the Jalisco Highlands.

"Melly's tequila, what stood out for us there is it's got a more gentle and elegant finish to it," Bottorff says. "And we personally preferred that. And so that's the direction we went."

They did not simply put a label on it, either. What Barajas had sent was one of her existing blancos, which got them into the right neighborhood.

On their first visit she lined up several options, and they narrowed it down even more.

"We had a tasting and we're like, okay, we want to be between these blancos," Bottorff says. Each round of sampling tightened the target until the profile belonged uniquely to their new tequila brand: TC Craft.

That was 10 years ago, and TC Craft has been built around that profile ever since.

Two things at once.

The first is Tequila Clásico, which points at how the tequila is made. Open-air fermentation. A roller mill. Clay ovens. The equipment you find at a small craft distillery rather than a corporate one.

The second is Todd and Chad.

"TC and the ethos of the brand is about really transparency and authenticity, and all of those things that we didn't even know how to name when we started," Bottorff says. "We're not trying to create some mythical beast that landed on a mountaintop. We're trying to serve up a lot of quality without a lot of pretention."

The back label of the TC Craft bottle reads "Only for our friends"

That line is not something the brothers reverse-engineered later. The first people who ever tasted TC Craft were friends sitting around a table with numbered, disguised bottles, telling the brothers what they honestly thought.

Bottorff still describes the job the same way. Make something good, then hand it to people you like.

Neither one came from the drinks business. Todd Bottorff spent his career in book publishing and software. Chad works in commercial real estate and property development in Nashville.

What got them started was an argument Todd Bottorff keeps having with people.

"I'm a big believer that everything in a cocktail matters," he says. "There's a lot of people that go around and they're like, oh yeah, if you're going to make a margarita, don't worry about the tequila in it. I think that is flawed thinking."

Follow that line of inquiry, and you end up asking what the best tequila actually is. Bottorff woke up in the middle of the night chewing on it, then called his brother the next morning.

"I said, I've got an idea. And he said, okay, I'm listening. I said, I think we should start a tequila brand."

Neither of them knew a single distillery in Jalisco.

"You just start calling everybody that you know that's involved in tequila," Bottorff says. "And then eventually somebody says, well, I know a guy."

The guy was a Mexican “tequila scout”, living in Arizona, and knew all the distilleries and distillers. He told the brothers which ones did serious work and which ones to skip.

That shortlist is what ended up on the table in construction paper.

Almost every tequila brand produces year round. TC Craft makes tequila in fall and winter only, then stops. Why? Cold. Specifically, cold air.

TC Craft is made at Melly Barajas's in Valle de Guadalupe, Jalisco. Not the Valle de Guadalupe in Baja California that Mexican wine drinkers know. This one is a small town in the Highlands of Jalisco, and it gets genuinely cool in winter.

This climate has a huge impact on perhaps the most important element of aroma and flavor development: fermentation.

Once the cooked agave sugars go into the tank, yeast starts to eat the sweet, converting into alcohol, and the speed of that conversion is impacted by the temperature of the air around it. Warm air pushes the yeast to eat fast. Cool air makes it eat more slowly.

Most craft tequila using open-top tanks ferments in three to five days. TC Craft runs 10 days.

Bottorff has visited about 15 distilleries, and he asks about fermentation at every one. What would happen if other distilleries just left the yeast in the tank longer, approaching the 10 days Barajas employs?

And in reality, nothing would happen.

In warm conditions the yeast tears through the available sugar in a few days. Once that sugar is gone, the yeast has nothing left to eat and the work stops. Leaving the tank alone for another week adds little to no flavor, because there is no fermentation going on inside it.

Which means you cannot get aromatic and flavor intensity by simply extending a fast fermentation. You have to slow the whole thing down from the beginning, so the same conversion happens gradually instead of all at once.

"So the question for us is, how do you slow cook tequila," Bottorff says.

They use cold air to achieve this. Barajas ferments in open tanks that are exposed to the room, and during the cooler months, the sugar conversion process takes three times longer.

There is also no commercial yeast anywhere in the process.

Most distilleries add it, because purchased yeast is fast and predictable. TC Craft uses only the wild yeast already living on the agave. Barajas keeps a house starter going, which Bottorff compares to a sourdough mother that stays alive for generations.

One more step happens at the end. Before bottling, the tequila is aerated and oxygenated, which rounds off the sharp edges. It has been done that way since the first batch.

That is why TC Craft does not have a lot of “bite” on the finish.

But all of this has a price. Half the year, the brand cannot make tequila at all.

Bottorff is fine with that, because the alternative would require making an entirely different tequila.

Bottorff will tell you exactly who this tequila is for.

"Our tequila appeals more to people that really like tequila, but are not the tequila aficionados," he says. "We don't do a high proof. We aren’t trying to hit people over the head with super-strong flavors that burn your throat.”

At tasting events, he hears two reactions over and over. "That's good." And "it's smooth." Bartenders and tequila reviewers tend to avoid “smooth” because smooth describes texture rather than flavor. Bottorff does not care.

"If regular tequila drinkers say it’s smooth, I view that as badge of honor," he says.

“If 20 million Americans drink tequila and that is the word they reach for, how can 20 million people be wrong? Because they paid for their ability to call it whatever they want."

The TC Craft lineup includes four expressions. Everything rests in white oak whiskey barrels, and everything ages far longer than the regulations require.

TC Craft Blanco, $46.99. Small-batch and 80 proof, made from eight to nine year agave grown without chemical herbicides or pesticides, with Highlands spring water and natural agave yeast.

TC Craft describes it as crystal clear and super smooth, and says it goes down without the "tequila cringe." Their pick for margaritas.

TC Craft Reposado, $51.99. Aged a full year, which means it could be classified as an añejo if they wanted to do so. But because it’s aged in used barrels the oak stays in the background. TC Craft notes lime citrus and a smoky agave aroma, then caramel and honey with a warm, toasty finish.

TC Craft Añejo, $74.99. Aged three years, which is triple the category minimum. TC Craft recommends it neat, or in tequila versions of a Manhattan or an Old-Fashioned.

TC Craft Extra Añejo, $139.99. Exceptional tequila. Aged eight years. TC Craft describes caramel and cocoa, rich and complex, and says it sips like the best aged whiskeys. Just a few cases remain of this one.

Because producing only in the Fall and Winter constrains supply, and they refuse to change the recipe.

TC Craft has distributors in Tennessee, Georgia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Arkansas, Oklahoma, California, Rhode Island, Wyoming, and Florida. Even in those markets it’s a big mover in specific stores rather than on every shelf of every retailer.

Shipping direct helps. Consumers in 40 U.S. states can purchase TC Craft online.

"We just concentrate on the quality of the product," Bottorff says, "We don’t care about being available everywhere.”

The marketing runs on the same logic. No big campaigns. Just hundreds of tasting events, every weekend, somewhere in the country.

"Taylor Swift's comment, that if you want to sell a million albums, you shake a million hands," Bottorff says. "If you want to sell a million bottles, then you are passing the tasting cup across to somebody a million times."

Getting people to actually try TC Craft IS the marketing strategy, partially born from the hundreds and hundreds of brands now available. It’s the same reason why TC Craft doesn’t have a high proof tequila, or special releases.

"There's already enough diversity of flavor profiles among blanco tequilas that people haven't even had a chance to try," he says. New seasonal releases, in his view, pull time and money away from that.

"There's a beauty in simplicity that needs to be explored, as long as it’s craft."

Bottorff has a rule for how he and his brother run TC Craft.

“Rule number one, be cool. That's it."

"We got into tequila because we thought it was cool. We loved it," Bottorff says. "You’ve got to constantly remind yourself of your love for it. That's the reason that we do all this. So that we can have a good time with our friends, and appreciate the people that are willing to buy our product. That's what we're all about."

Which is roughly what happened the night 12 bottles sat on a table in construction paper, and a room full of friends told two brothers which one they liked.

It still says so on the back of the bottle.

ONLY FOR OUR FRIENDS.

TC Craft is a presenting partner of The Tequila Report.