A California brand and a distiller in Los Altos.

La Gritona is a tequila brand with one product: a reposado, or rested tequila, distilled in Valle de Guadalupe, a small town in the Los Altos highlands of Jalisco. The brand says it is distilled by Melly Barajas and her staff of women at her small distillery there, under the producer number NOM 1533. Its Australian importer, Bibendum, translates the name as “The Screamer,” and calls it apt because one of the people behind the tequila is the Los Angeles punk guitarist Andy Coronado; the other, it says, is the distiller, whom it calls Melly Cárdenas.

The brand and the distillery are separate things. In a September 2018 profile headlined “La reina del tequila,” Pablo Ferri of El País Semanal described La Gritona as “a prestigious California brand” that had worked with Barajas for years, and captioned it as a brand for which she works. Her own company, Vinos y Licores Azteca, makes tequila both for its own labels, such as El Conde Azul, and for other brands under contract, Ferri reported.

Barajas came to tequila from outside the trade. According to Ferri, in the late 1990s she was designing denim clothing for shops in Guadalajara and, trained as an educator, teaching in poor neighbourhoods, when she set out to make a private batch of tequila for her father to share with his friends. She registered a brand, Raza Azteca, persuaded producers near Tequila to make it, and went on to buy tequila equipment and a hacienda on which to build a factory. In 2018, El País wrote, the factory was marking 20 years.

Ferri also recorded how the trade first received her. At her first meeting with Jalisco’s tequila businessmen, Barajas recalled, one of the men stood up, pointed at her and asked what that woman was doing there, and threatened to leave if she stayed; the others, she said, asked him to go instead, and she stayed. Some in the industry had been unkind to her, she told Ferri, but others had helped.

Earthen ovens, open vats and reused barrels.

La Gritona’s description of itself is mostly a description of process. The brand says it uses agave typically eight to ten years old, grown in the iron-rich red soil of the Jalisco highlands, and that the agave goes into the ovens within 24 hours of trimming. It is steam-cooked for 24 hours in two thick-walled earthen ovens and rested for another day, crushed with a steel mill, fermented naturally in open steel vats for usually eight to twelve days depending on the air temperature, and distilled twice in steel stills with copper coils. The brand also lists what it does not use: copper pot stills, a tahona, a diffuser or an autoclave.

The resting is where the brand departs from most reposados, it says. The tequila spends about six months in reused American whiskey barrels — it names Jack Daniel’s and Balcones — that are used over and over until they have given up most of their oak, whiskey and colour. The aim, the brand says, is to round out the blanco rather than add the vanilla and sweet notes associated with reposado, which is why it calls its tequila “very pale” for its category. It also describes La Gritona as additive-free, and recommends drinking it straight. Bibendum puts the intention in Barajas’s words: “It’s Tequila like our grandparents drank.”

The people are part of the brand. Ferri found the workforce at Vinos y Licores Azteca was all women except for one engineer, and Barajas told him she had made that a requirement after the first applicants in Valle de Guadalupe, where many men had migrated to the United States, turned out to be women. The brand repeats the point, saying a small staff of local women works each process from start to finish, all under one roof, and that leftover agave fibre goes to local farmers as cattle feed.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all tequilas: El Tesoro, G4, Cascahuín, La Gritona, Siete Leguas, Arette and Mijenta. Tequila is a protected name. English Wikipedia records that it became Mexico’s first appellation of origin in 1974, and that under that appellation the agave may be grown and the spirit made only in Jalisco and in selected municipalities of a few other Mexican states, from blue Weber agave. Within that common frame, the brands here range from family houses to younger labels.

A tequila brand’s identity is often carried less by the liquid than by its label, its bottle and the place it names, because the name on the front and the distillery behind it are not always the same thing. Every bottle carries a NOM number, which English Wikipedia describes as the government-assigned number of the distillery where the tequila was produced, so a single distillery can make tequila for more than one brand. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its tequila is actually distilled.

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

Recycled glass, photography and a short list.

The brand keeps its packaging story short. It says its bottles are blown from 100 per cent recycled glass in Mexico City by the glassmaker Pavisa, and sells its reposado in 50ml, 375ml and 750ml bottles, with 700ml bottles for international importers. Its website thanks the photographers Brandon Harman and Atiba Jefferson for many of the images on it, and credits Shipwreck Design for the site’s design; it also sells caps and other merchandise.

Its press page lists coverage in, among others, The New York Times, which profiled Barajas in May 2018, and El País, whose 2018 profile is quoted above. In the United States the brand directs distributors to the importer T. Edward Wines, and lists importers in Australia, Canada, Europe, South Africa and Taiwan.

For a design guide, La Gritona shows how a single product, a named distiller and a plain account of method can carry a brand. Compare Tequila Ocho, the single-estate tequila from Arandas, also in Los Altos, and Cascahuín, a family distillery in the Valles. For this guide we use agave green, red highland soil and black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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