A Guadalajara founder, a cobalt glaze and a name taken from the agave.

Clase Azul began in Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco, in 1997. The company says its founder and chief executive, Arturo Lomelí, set it up that year to reimagine tequila as a global expression of Mexican heritage and artistry, and it describes itself today as an independent luxury house. In 2022 its website marked the anniversary in the same terms, telling the story of “a dream” that had begun 25 years earlier: to share the magic of Mexican culture with the world.

The brand’s name and its look were born together. The company says its first decanter was white and cobalt blue, handcrafted by Mexican artisans, and that the name followed from it: blue like the agave its tequilas are made from, and blue like the cobalt glaze, or paint, on that first Reposado decanter. The Reposado bottle remains the house’s flagship, and the company calls it its “artisanal signature.”

The tequila is made from 100% blue agave. The company says the agave is harvested by hand in Los Altos de Jalisco, and its 2021 website said the plants grew for six to eight years before harvest. That older site described the process step by step: about 72 hours of cooking in masonry ovens, fermentation with the company’s own yeast, and two distillations with a wide cut of heads and tails.

The company has also described hard years. Its 2022 history said its first 25 years had not been without difficulties, naming natural disasters and financial crises as threats that made it question its future. In the same text it said Clase Azul was by then sold in more than 55 countries.

Clay, brushes and a workshop called Tradición Mazahua.

What sets Clase Azul apart is the bottle. In 2021 the company’s website said each tequila decanter was handmade and hand painted by its artisans in the small Mexican town of Santa María Canchesdá, where about 350 workers sculpted and painted them one by one using the ancient techniques of the Mazahua people. Its 2022 history added that in 2007 the company founded Tradición Mazahua, a ceramic workshop where Clase Azul artisans make the decanters.

The company now gives some of the timings. It says the Reposado decanter takes seven days to make, from raw clay to the last glazed brushstroke, and that the decoration of the Ultra decanter is entrusted only to its most skilled artisans, who apply the platinum detailing from memory; the design is revealed only after firing. The cap of its Guerrero mezcal can take up to twelve days, using materials from the state of Guerrero. The company names its longest-serving master artisan, Jaime Zaldívar, who it says has worked with the house since its earliest days, along with its master distiller, Viridiana Tinoco, and creative director, Sofía Ortiz García. New pieces start in a Creative Lab in Guadalajara.

The range has grown beyond the Reposado. Clase Azul now lists six tequilas, among them Plata, Gold, Añejo and a smoky Blanco Ahumado whose agave, the company says, is cooked in a traditional pit oven for more than 110 hours, alongside three mezcals named for Durango, Guerrero and San Luis Potosí. Limited editions are certified through the Aura Blockchain Consortium, the company says.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all tequila and liqueur names: Casa Noble, Clase Azul, 1800, Hornitos, Cazadores, Corralejo and RumChata. Tequila and liqueur brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a cocktail bar.

A tequila or liqueur brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirit is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a tequila bottle to a house of places.

Around its 25th anniversary the company changed its name in public. Its 2022 website said, “Today we have transformed to Clase Azul México,” and presented a new brand identity while keeping the cobalt decanter at the centre. The house also runs places to visit. The company says La Hacienda, about a ninety-minute drive from Guadalajara in Los Altos de Jalisco, brings its distillery and a working ceramics workshop together on a site of about 50 acres designed with five architecture firms, with a restaurant called OYA. In Mexico City it runs Casa de los Leones, a restored mansion in Polanco with tastings, a boutique and a collector’s lounge, and it also has a boutique in Los Cabos.

The company ties the craft to social programmes. It says its Fundación Causa Azul supports artisan communities so they can preserve their heritage and live from their work, and in 2022 it described a youth football team, Mazorqueros, as part of the same mission. Among its listed certifications are the Positive Luxury Butterfly Mark, a kosher certificate from OK Kosher and Mexico’s “Hecho en México” mark, and the company says it has received the Mexican Center for Philanthropy’s Socially Responsible Company distinction for six years running.

For a design guide, Clase Azul shows how a single object, a hand-painted bottle, can become a whole brand: the name, the colour and the visitor experience all start from the decanter. Our Clase Azul font guide looks at its lettering. Compare Casa Noble, whose reposado came in a cobalt-blue porcelain decanter, according to a trade column reprinted in 2008, and José Cuervo, the tequila house from the town of Tequila. For this guide we use cobalt glaze, clay white and burnished gold with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Clase Azul’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.