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Fellow Drammers!
We’re excited to continue to explore the world of additive-free tequilas with a special online event with Cazcanes Tequila on Tuesday, November 17th starting at 5pm Pacific / 8pm EST. Our guest speaker is Cazcanes’ Global Brand Ambassador Drake Schaneberg.
If you’re not familiar with the extraordinary drama surrounding the “additive free” label, it’s worth a Google, but it culminated with the Mexican authorities raiding the home of the founders of the Tequila Matchmaker website which had been leading the additive-free charge. On paper, the raid claimed they were making “adulterated tequila” in their home, but it was almost universally seen as blowback for their push for transparency on which tequilas were adding sugars and other things to their products, and which ones weren’t. They did this by creating an opt-in verification initiative (later branded as the Additive-Free Alliance) to test distilleries and label pure products as “additive free”, which of course the distilleries that were making additive-free tequila were very excited about. Not surprisingly, it REALLY pissed off the brands that were adulterating their tequilas, or at least that’s what many thought led to the raid, and they ultimately abandoned the project (and last I heard, may have had to go into hiding!). There weren’t a ton of brands on that list when they shut it down, but one of them was Cazcanes, which is why we wanted to explore it further.
We’ll get into the history of Cazcanes tequila at the tasting, but as we understand it, it was initially founded in Los Angeles, California around 2016 by brothers Colin and Chris Edwards alongside co-founder Jose Santillan. Interestingly, they initially met tequilero Humberto Alvarado in the Mexican jungle near Magdalena — a third-generation distiller preserving ancestral distillation methods in ultra small batches (which Cazcanes releases today as a very limited edition “Nuestras Raices” batch each year — we’ll be tasting the 2026 edition at this event). But with bigger production ideas in mind, it sounds like they decided to work with Humberto to have his receipes made at a larger/more modern facility, which ultimately became NOM 1614 (Tequilera TAP) with Master distiller Francisco “Don Chico” Jimenez Lazcarro. They have a wide range of expressions (we’ll be tasting 9 of them at this tasting), and they use a numbering system which can confuse people, but it’s fairly straight-forward — it simply indicates the proof level. “No. 7” is 40% abv, “No. 9” is 50%, “No. 10” is still strength of 54%. My guess is many of you know the differences between blanco (unaged), reposado (aged 3+ months) and anejo (aged 1+ years), all in ex-bourbon barrels. They also have a “rosa blanco” and “rosa reposado” aged in ex-red wine barrels, and then you have “joven” which blends blanco with usually small amounts of one of the aged expressions.
We’ll be tasting all of that at this event:
Nuestras Raices - 2026 Limited Edition (these are quite rare)
No. 7 - Blanco (40% abv)
No. 9 - Blanco (50% abv)
No. 10 - Blanco (54% abv, still strength)
No. 7 - Reposado (40% abv)
No. 9 - Rosa Blanco (40% abv)
No. 9 - Rosa Reposado (50% abv)
No. 7 - Anejo (40% abv)
No. 7 - Joven (40% abv)
That’s our lineup! It’s pretty darned close to everything they’ve released. We hope you can join us! The event will take place over Zoom and we will circulate Zoom login details closer to the event. While we believe this is the final lineup, it’s always possible it may change (for example if our guest speaker requests a change), but it’s rare and if it does happen, the lineup will likely just get better. We hope you can join us! Please let us know if you have any questions.
Cheers,
Drammers Club