A distillery administrator, a family and a horseshoe in the agave fields.

Herradura is made in Amatitán, a town in the Mexican state of Jalisco. English Wikipedia, which names the company formally as Grupo Industrial Herradura, says the first known owner of the tequila-making property was Feliciano Romo, early in the 19th century. The story the company tells begins later, with Félix López, who worked as administrator of the distillery for its owners, Josefa Salazar and her sons.

In 1870, English Wikipedia says, López took over the distillery and its agave fields and registered them as a tequila producer under the name Hacienda San José del Refugio; 1870 is the year Herradura gives as its founding, and the company marked 150 years in 2020. López and his wife, Carmen Rosales, built a production facility at the hacienda that stayed in use until 1963. From 1878 Carmen Rosales ran the business with her brother Ambrosio Rosales and his wife, Elisa Gómez Cuervo, and the hacienda later passed to her son, Aurelio López.

Aurelio gave the tequila its name. Herradura is Spanish for horseshoe, and the company’s own account, as summarised by English Wikipedia, says that in the early 1900s Aurelio found a horseshoe gleaming like gold while inspecting the agave fields and kept it for luck. The railways built across Mexico in the late 19th century had already made it easier to ship the hacienda’s tequila to other parts of the country.

The 1920s brought the Cristero War. English Wikipedia says Aurelio and his sister María de Jesús sympathised with the Cristeros, escaped when government troops surrounded the hacienda, and that Aurelio never returned. The property passed to his cousin David Rosales, who kept the tequila 100% agave when many producers were blending, and who in 1928 registered the Herradura brand in Mexico City with a horseshoe as its logo.

A horseshoe, a crest and the reposado year.

The horseshoe has been the brand’s emblem since that 1928 registration, and it is still the centre of the pack. In July 2009, tequila.net reported a redesign of the primary and secondary packaging for the Blanco, Reposado and Añejo bottles by the Brown-Forman Design Group working with the brand design company Duffy & Partners, tied to the brand’s 140 years. The front label gained a larger, more realistic horseshoe encasing the Casa Herradura crest. On the single-bottle boxes, the report said, a black horseshoe wraps around a corner, so that boxes set side by side form a complete horseshoe. Packaging Digest covered the same redesign.

The other half of the identity is a list of dates. A company timeline published for its 150th year gives Añejo in 1962, Reposado in 1974, Plata in 1975 and the extra añejo Selección Suprema in 1995. The company is widely credited with the first of these styles: The Tasting Panel wrote in April 2018 that Herradura was the first distiller to release a reposado, in 1974, and an extra añejo, in 1995, and The Spirits Business wrote in February 2024 that the distiller is “credited with inventing the very first Reposado in 1974.”

Production methods are part of how the brand presents itself. English Wikipedia says Herradura tequilas are made with agave hearts roasted in clay ovens and fermented with wild yeast, and that the company has handled every stage from growing agave to bottling. The Spirits Business reported in 2024 that Casa Herradura makes its own barrels, possibly one of very few tequila distilleries to do so, and ages in charred American white oak casks.

The family years also brought a dispute. English Wikipedia says that in the 1990s there was conflict over sales of shares in the company and of agave-growing land by some family members, and that in 2004 Herradura bought back its foreign-owned shares to become wholly Mexican-owned again.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all tequila and whisky names: Sauza, Don Julio, Olmeca, El Jimador, Herradura, Espolòn and Canadian Club. Spirits 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 bar list.

A spirits 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 tequila or whisky is actually distilled 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 family hacienda to Brown-Forman.

The family company grew beyond one brand before it was sold. English Wikipedia says Casa Herradura introduced el Jimador in 1994 and the ready-to-drink tequila mix New Mix in 1997. In August 2006 the Louisville drinks company Brown-Forman, owner of Jack Daniel’s, announced an agreement to buy the business, covering Herradura, el Jimador and New Mix, the production facilities and a sales and distribution organisation in Mexico. Brown-Forman said on 18 January 2007 that it had completed the purchase of substantially all of the company’s assets.

Production stayed where it was. English Wikipedia says the tequila is still made at the Amatitán facilities under a Mexican subsidiary, and that the hacienda is part of the local tourist trade, with the Tequila Express train from Guadalajara stopping there. It also says Wine Enthusiast named Herradura its best distillery of 2007. The brand has kept collecting trade awards since: The Spirits Business reported that the Reposado won a Master award at its Tequila & Mezcal Masters in 2024, a win the magazine tied to fifty years of the style.

The name needs a little care in search. Herradura is an everyday Spanish word for horseshoe and appears in place names in Spain and Latin America; the tequila is usually sold as Herradura or Tequila Herradura, and its maker as Casa Herradura. Our separate note on the Herradura font looks at its lettering.

For a design guide, Herradura shows how one object found in a field, registered as a logo in 1928 and redrawn as a larger horseshoe around a crest in 2009, can carry a tequila from a family hacienda to a multinational owner without changing where it is made. Compare José Cuervo, the tequila house from the town of Tequila, and el Jimador, its sister brand from the same distillery. For this guide we use horseshoe copper, barrel brown and agave green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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