Casa Herradura

Tequila Herradura's story begins in 1870, when Félix López took over a property in the village of Amatitán, Jalisco, renamed it Hacienda San José del Refugio, and registered it as an official distillery. The hacienda's original factory building still stands, its main hall lined with stone fermentation pits carved into the floor and linked by small canals to a room holding a bank of copper stills.

All of Herradura's agave is estate-grown at the hacienda. Piñas are cooked in hand-raised clay ovens (hornos) for roughly 26 hours before fermentation, which relies on wild, airborne yeast rather than a cultivated strain. More than 16 species of fruit and citrus trees grow on the property, and the yeast strains they carry are credited with shaping the tequila's flavor.

The current range moves through a defined aging ladder: Silver rests in barrel for 45 days, Reposado for 11 months, and Añejo for more than 25 months — beyond the legal minimum for the category. The top expression, Selección Suprema, is aged 100 months in hand-crafted American white oak and marketed as the first Extra Añejo tequila, a category Herradura says it originated. The brand today belongs to Brown-Forman, the Louisville, Kentucky spirits company, which markets the line's 150-plus-year hacienda history alongside its barrel program.

Visitors can tour the hacienda grounds, walking past the same fermentation pits and stills referenced in the brand's own historical materials, though specific current tour logistics were not available on the site consulted for this profile.