The History of Tequila
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thrillist.com (May 5th, 2022)
The history of tequila
Tequila, or rather the practice of making alcohol from the blue agave plant, dates back thousands of years, when the Aztecs used the agave sap (specifically the maguey, a cousin of blue agave) to ferment a drink known as pulque. So revered was this milky liquid in Aztec culture that they worshiped not one but two pulque-centric gods: Mayahuel, the goddess of the maguey, and her husband Patecatl, the god of pulque itself.
While pulque has been around for millennia, it wasn’t until after the Spanish invaded Mexico in the early 1500s that anyone thought to distill an agave-based spirit. After establishing colonies, the Spanish government opened a trade route between Manila and Mexico. They exported Mexican silver to Manila and, in return, brought back things like silk, spices and, most importantly for our purposes, coconut brandy and the stills used to make it. The brandy quickly grew in popularity, and soon the thirsty colonists were distilling their own version of the spirit made with agave instead of coconuts, creating one of North America’s first Indigenous-distilled spirits.
In the early 1600s, Don Pedro Sánchez de Tagle, "the Father of Tequila," built the first large-scale distillery in what is now Tequila, Jalisco, producing “mezcal de Tequila” or what we now know as tequila. It should be noted that for the first couple hundred years, mezcal and tequila were regarded as the same thing. It wasn’t until Don Cenobio Sauza (of Sauza Tequila) came into the picture in the 1870s that distinctions started to appear. He is credited with determining that blue agave was the best agave for tequila production. Though that decision wasn't ratified into law until much later, other distillers in Sauza’s region followed his lead, preferring the blue agave plant to any other.
The Jose Cuervo family was granted the first license to produce tequila commercially from Spain’s King Carlos IV, and Sauza was the first to export it to the United States, shortening its name from “Tequila Extract” to “Tequila.” Sauza’s grandson Don Francisco Javier helped to establish the region of Jalisco as a prime area for tequila-producing and is infamous for his decree that, “There cannot be tequila where there are no agaves!”
Still, tequila didn’t find a real American audience until Prohibition, when European spirits were unavailable and the domestic offerings were little better than bathtub gin and moonshine. Thanks to bootleggers bringing bottles over the border and Tijuana’s close proximity and plentiful bars, tequila found a place in American glasses.
In 1978, the Mexican government declared the term “tequila” their intellectual property, requiring it be made and aged only in certain parts of the country. The laws also made it illegal for other countries to produce and sell “tequila” as their own. To produce something that could be labeled as tequila, distillers were also compelled to follow the official standards of tequila production, which included using only blue agave hearts.