1. Harvest.
We harvest individual plants at the height of their maturity. This means that our agaves are ready for harvest when they are between 8 and 10 years old. Harvesting kills the plant. Tequila, by the way, is the only spirit where the raw materials do not renew easily and grow every year, year after year. The Agave plantations for El Agave Artesanal tequila are carefully labored year round to produce only quality Agave Tequilana Weber plants.

2. Cooking.
We cook our quality agaves in traditional stone ovens called hornos. The cooking process converts the agave starches to sugars. This can be done in as little as 12 hours in commercial autoclaves, but our process, which uses tradiitional hornos takes a total of 36 hours for the cooking process to arrive at peak flavor and density.

3. Extraction.
The next step is the extraction of the agave juice, called aguamiel. Our traditional approach uses giant stone milling wheels. Although roughly 30% less efficient than modern techniques that use motors, gears and steel rollers, our stone milling wheel offers higher quality results with a more gentle approach to the milling process.

4. Fermentation of the sugars.
Specially selected yeasts are added to large tanks of extracted agave juice to produce fermentation, converting the sugars to alcohol. Eventually, the increasing alcohol level eats up all the yeast, and fermentation ends. The fermentation process produces an alcohol level of 5 to 7%.

5. Distillation.
At El Agave we use the traditional batch-oriented process of distillation, using pot stills to purify and raise the alcohol level of the fermented juice. The first distillation process produces ordinario. The Ordinario is distilled two more times to obtain the unique flavors and nuances that only our triple distillation process creates.

6. Aging.
All our tequilas go through different levels of aging processes in French 55 gallon white oak barrels.This adds additional color and complexity to our tequilas. Our barrels are kept in a unique atmoshpere where temperature and humidity are strictly controlled to guarantee the best results of the aging process. From the classic character of Agave Silver, to the more complex wood nuances and flavors, and greater smoothness of the Añejos, aging is a very important part of the process at the El Agave Artesanal plant in Jalisco.