Patron Anejo Tequila (750 ml)

When John Paul DeJoria and Martin Crowley launched Patrón in 1989, 100% agave tequila at luxury price points did not exist as a commercial category — the spirit was consumed as a shot with salt and lime. Their founding Master Distiller Francisco Alcaraz chose Atotonilco El Alto in the Los Altos highlands of Jalisco specifically for its contaminant-free water supply and the sweeter, fruitier agave character that highland elevation produces compared to lowland fruit.

At Hacienda Patrón (NOM 1492), piñas are hand-chopped and slow-baked in small clay brick ovens for exactly 79 hours using alternating steam-and-rest cycles, then crushed by two parallel methods: a two-ton volcanic tahona wheel and a modern roller mill. The two juices ferment separately in open pinewood tanks for a minimum of 72 hours before double distillation in small-batch copper pot stills — six tall narrow stills for the first pass, five shorter rounder stills for the second — a geometry Alcaraz designed to strip sulfur and preserve aromatic complexity.

The Añejo rests approximately 12 months in a combination of ex-bourbon American oak and French oak barrels inside an 11,000-barrel aging room on site. What no peer at this production scale replicates: rather than automating as demand grew, Patrón cloned identical copper pot stills and brick ovens — the same small-batch geometry now runs at multi-million-case volume. Each bottle passes through approximately 60 hands, hand-numbered, hand-corked, and hand-sealed at 40% ABV.