There’s an incredibly-complex, ongoing situation with Tequila that needs a very simple explanation, but unfortunately is quite difficult to summarize.
Last night, however, while stress-eating whatever junk food I could grab at the store before leaving, it hit me: Hot Cheetos.
Hot Cheetos are delicious, right? You can’t stop eating them once you start (at least I couldn’t as the election results kept rolling in). They taste so good, and they’re oh-so satisfying, but you recognize them for what they are: cheap little puffs of starch that are covered with artificial flavoring.
That doesn’t mean you won’t continue eating them, but it does mean that you would never pay $100 for a bag of Hot Cheetos. Or would you?
That’s what I have to ask some Tequila drinkers these days because most of the population has no idea that most of the Tequila it’s drinking is basically distilled starch water with artificial chemicals added to make it taste like Tequila.
It’s called diffuser Tequila. It is the Hot Cheetos of booze. It may taste good, but it’s super cheap to make and it’s full of sugar.
What is a diffuser and why is it such a dastardly machine? I’ll tell you. There are plenty of articles that go into detail about what the diffuser is and how it works, but I'll give you the simple breakdown here:
Diffusers make Tequila production cheaper and faster! But not better.
As a result of so much production, agave is now short supply! Producers want to get the most potential alcohol from every single piña harvested. Blue agaves take 6-10 years to fully ripen, which is too long for many producers to wait when sales of Tequila are at an all-time high.
Traditionally in Tequila production, the piñas are cooked, crushed, and pressed to extract the sugars, which are eventually fermented in tanks or vats like with winemaking. In both cases, the process requires ripe produce because one needs sugar to start a healthy fermentation (I've always said that Tequila and mezcal are much more like wine than whiskey for that reason).
With the invention of the agave diffuser, the need to cook and crush the agave has been completely eliminated from the process. Instead, an uncooked, under-ripe, sugarless agave is fed into a shredder and the resulting agave chunks are moved onto a conveyor belt into the diffuser.
The diffuser sprays the agave pieces with hot water that extracts the starch from the pulpy plant and collects it in a tank. Now rather than having to cook the actual agave to create the sugars, the distilleries can instead boil the starch water and add an enzyme to convert that starch into sugar, much like how Bourbon is made (and not at all like wine).
While the diffuser results in a more efficient use of manpower and potential alcohol, it results in a flavorless product. But, much like with processed food, all that "agave" flavor can be re-added later on the back end (like the seasoning on Hot Cheetos).
Because the resulting diffuser Tequila is still entirely a product of agave, the labels continue to tout their "100% agave" classification and market the liquid as a top quality Tequila, rather than a mixto or blended agave product. It means they can use young agave piñas that have no sugar and no flavor, and still make “Tequila.”
The reason Patrón Tequila was such a big deal when it first launched was because it marketed itself as 100% agave—meaning no added grain alcohol. It’s quite akin to the single malt revolution that began around 2007, when drinkers began passing up blended Scotch because it uses grain whisky to stretch out volume. Savvy sophisticates wanted the good stuff—pure. No baby laxative added to the cocaine. Just the straight product.
From that point on, every premium Tequila began putting “100% agave” right there on the label to distinguish it from cheaper mixtos.
The problem Tequila producers found themselves in nearly two decades later was that the new demand for 100% pure agave Tequila was using up all the agave! But they couldn’t go back to making mixtos because that would destroy the lucrative market they had worked so hard to create. So they invented the diffuser.
Now I know what you’re going to ask next: David, which distilleries are using diffusers?
Let me tell you the hard truth: it’s much easier to ask which distilleries aren’t using diffusers.
And let me add this: while some diffused Tequilas taste very smooth, with lots of richness and no burn, there’s no economical justification for a fancy diffuser Tequila to exist. Yet, they’re out there.
And they’re like $100 bags of Hot Cheetos.
-David Driscoll
(P.S.- If you’d like suggestions as to which producers make a traditional Tequila without diffusers, additives, or other artificial flavorings, check out this blog post here)