Is ‘Additive-Free’ Tequila the New 100% Agave?

In 2012 Grover and Scarlet Sanschagrin launched the mobile app Tequila Matchmaker as an offshoot of their online blog Taste Tequila. Through the app, Grover and Scarlet have compiled production information on more than 2,000 tequila brands, creating an at-your-fingertips database for consumers who care to know more about how their tequila is made.

Several years ago, representatives of producers began to approach the pair, asking for their brands to be listed as additive-free on the app. However, as trained catadores (the tequila equivalent of a sommelier), Grover and Scarlet identified inconsistencies between many brands’ additive-free claims and what they were experiencing in the glass.

“We realized this was important information and users of our app were requesting it, so we developed a program for evaluating a brand or distiller’s claims,” says Grover. 

These requests for information follow a trend toward transparency among industry professionals and consumers alike. 

“In the last 40 years, the consumer interest in the tequila industry has shifted from mixto tequilas to 100% agave tequilas because people feel that is a more authentic product,” says Guillermo Erickson Sauza, founder of Tequila Fortaleza. “The next step to authenticity is additive-free.” 

Not a New Phenomenon

The use of additives in tequila dates back hundreds of years, says investigative journalist Ted Genoways, who has covered agave spirits for more than a decade. The tequila industry saw its earliest boom in the 1840s and ’50s with the construction of multiple large distilleries. Shortly thereafter, Mexico was plunged into the War of Reform in the late 1850s, followed by the French Intervention in the early 1860s.

“This period of strife left the fields neglected resulting in a blight that affected the agave for decades,” says Genoways.

The industry responded by introducing other sugar sources such as corn and cane sugar in addition to agave. However, the resulting tequila was riddled with bad aromas and flavors due to the blighted materia prima, or raw material. Sugar and chemical additives, including liquid ether, were used to mask off-putting aromas and flavors.

Tequila’s erstwhile reputation for causing hangovers was the result of these harmful additives. Big agave growers and distillers banded together in the 1880s to push for a quality standard that required producers to create additive-free tequila from 100% agave, but their efforts were fruitless. A global movement around food safety in the early 1900s led to the ban of some additives, but only those that were potentially harmful to consumer health or even lethal.  

Some agave products now considered traditional resulted from these early experiments with additives. Tequila almendrado, an almond-flavored tequila-based liqueur, grew out of some of the early attempts at barrel aging, while the addition of animal fats and fruits to the distillate, originally intended to hide flaws, helped form a new category of spirits called pechugas.

“There is a lot of romanticism around it,” says Genoways. “We like to think of those products as traditional, but it really is growing out of that same lineage of covering something up at a time when the agave just isn’t where you would like it to be.”

In modern times, the use of additives has increased with the implementation of more industrialized means of production.

“Many [agave] products are made in an extremely fast, industrial, neutral way,” says Grover. “The only choice [producers] have is to use additives to bring some type of aroma and flavor back to the distillate. So instead of using the process to generate natural aromas and flavors, they short-circuit the process by making a cheaper product and then use additives to give it some character.”

What Additives Are Hiding

Currently the legislation governing tequila production allows for four types of additives, or abocantes—caramel coloring, oak extract, glycerin, and sugar-based syrups called jarabes. These substances may be used to create consistency, evoke barrel aging, add sweetness and/or flavor essences, or hide defects in the product. 

By law, a producer can include up to 1% by weight of these additives in their tequila without having to indicate so on the label. This means that a bottle labeled “100% agave” could still contain a small amount of additives, and while 1% or less may seem miniscule, it can have an outsize impact on the final product. “The strength and potency of today’s additives are so strong and concentrated that we have never seen anything close to 1%,” says Grover. “If you were to use 1% it would not even resemble tequila because [the ingredients are] so powerful.”

The process to be listed in Grover and Scarlet’s recently renamed Additive-Free Alliance involves evaluation on multiple levels, including interviews of those working in the distillery, samples taken throughout the production process, and an intensive audit of logs kept at the distillery in compliance with governmental agencies.

“You basically have to open all your doors to them, literally all of them,” says Sergio Mendoza, founder and director of Tequila Don Fulano.  

Grover and Scarlet also purchase bottles from retailers to compare what’s being sold to consumers with what’s being offered at the distillery. If there are significant changes in flavor profile, samples are sent for laboratory analysis.

“We’re in the process of incorporating more laboratory analysis, but it is the part of the program that has been extremely expensive for us,” says Grover. “We absorb the expenses of the program for the first year as we don’t want the cost to get in the way of someone participating in the program. In the second year, if the brand has seen value in participating in the program and would like to renew, there is a recommended donation.” 

Educating Consumers on Additive-Free Tequila

Scarlet and Grover’s project is certainly gaining traction—Tequila Matchmaker currently lists over 100 brands as part of the Additive-Free Alliance, and more are requesting to be evaluated. But are consumers interested in the project?

“We’ve seen an incredible rise in interest for additive-free tequila amongst our clientele within the last year,” says Eileen Elliott, director of operations at Social Wines in South Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. “People are being educated about additives in tequila through social media and podcasts. We also place bottle tags with the Additive-Free Alliance decal to indicate which brands are additive-free. Since our agave collection within our wine shop is 90% additive-free, the ratio of tags to [no tag] absolutely encourages questions from more than half of the guests shopping the collection.”

The interest in additive-free tequila is also impacting what we are seeing in bars around the country.

“Additive-free is absolutely important for us when making decisions, especially as tequila’s prominence continues to grow,” says Ryan Lotz, beverage director for Traveler Street Hospitality in Boston. “Anyone buying tequila is making a decision to support or not support specific parts of the category and to help protect its culture and significance. I think it’s important that no one take where their dollar goes lightly when considering the preservation of the category. For me, additive-free means the brands have nothing to hide behind, that they’re doing things the right way, and they are helping to shepherd the category.”

Maxwell Reis, beverage director at Mírate in Los Angeles, ties the newfound interest in additive-free tequila to the growth of the mezcal category. 

“I think consumers have realized that mezcal is so much more unadulterated, that even at its core the majority of mezcal brands on the market that are problematic are considered problematic not because of additives, but because of things such as practices around sourcing raw material,” says Reis. “So people are coming back to tequila from mezcal, and looking for that purity, and it’s starting a much broader conversation.”

For Clayton Szczech, author of A Field Guide to Tequila, the importance of additive-free tequila lies in the educational component for consumers. 

“There are people getting into tequila not really understanding what a distillate from fermented cooked agave juice tastes like,” says Szczech. “The use of additives has created a false baseline for many consumers. Let’s start the conversation with tequilas that are coming as close as possible to having three ingredients—agave, yeast, and water—as a baseline.” 

“Grover and Scarlet and other people have done a lot of work to train people’s palates in that way and I think that is really important,” he adds.  

Mendoza says the use of additives robs the consumer of the most important aspect of tequila: the agave. “The consumers don’t get to experience, identify, and fall in love with the natural bounty and beauty of mature agave, which is really what makes agave spirits so unique,” he says. “The need for using additives and altering the natural process arises because we have lost a connection at the source, in the raw material, which alone makes great tequila.”

Thinking Beyond Additive-Free

While agave experts all say that additives are an important part of the conversation around transparency, they stress that the additive-free label is not the only indicator of quality. 

“It’s possible to have a low-quality tequila that does not contain additives,” says Grover. “Our role is not to play judge and jury about which are quality tequilas. We are here only to indicate whether additives are present or not.” 

Salvador Rosales Trejo, master distiller of Tequila Cascahuín, says it’s important to remember that labeling terms are, at the end of the day, used to market a product.

“Sustainability, artisanal, and additive-free are all words that have been equated with quality,” he says. “To start, these phrases were used to help educate the consumer, but along the way they began to be misused for marketing purposes. I feel that a philosophy of quality should be based upon a brand’s transparency, traceability, and producer ethics. The category of tequila should be focusing on supporting its natural and human resources in order to place it where it should be.”  

Szczech offers a similar sentiment. “I think anything that helps consumers in affluent countries really think about the fact that commodities have a history, and they have social relationships embedded in them, helps us to get beyond the fetishization of commodities,” he says. “If additives are one way into that conversation, then I’m all for it.”