A former Bacardi chief, a mixologist and a designer.

Mijenta is a young tequila. The Spirits Business and Shanken News Daily both reported on 1 September 2020 that Mike Dolan, a former chief executive of Bacardi, had launched the brand, beginning in the United States with a single Blanco. The Spirits Business said the project had been in development for two years and described Dolan as co-founder and lead investor. Shanken News Daily reported that the brand planned to reach Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Australia after the United States. Both trade titles gave the meaning of the name: it comes from the Spanish “mi gente,” “my people,” and Dolan told The Spirits Business that he wanted “to invest in the people that make the product.”

The founding team was wider than one investor. In an interview published by VinePair in August 2021, Elise Som was introduced as Mijenta’s co-founder and sustainability director, with Juan Coronado, a mixologist, and Dolan as her fellow co-founders. Shanken News Daily again named Coronado as a co-founder in February 2024, when it described Dolan, now styled Mike Dolan Sr., as the man leading the brand. The Moodie Davitt Report, announcing a travel-retail distribution deal with Blue Caterpillar in April 2023, also called Dolan co-founder and lead investor.

The tequila itself is the work of Ana María Romero Mena, Mijenta’s Maestra Tequilera. The Spirits Business described her in 2020 as a Mexico-based distiller with more than 25 years in the industry who oversaw production from harvest to bottle. InsideHook, in a November 2022 profile, said she is known for a tequila aroma wheel that has been an industry reference since 2007, and for a book on the aromas of tequila, and that she selects the yeast and set the brand’s flavour profile.

Pink packaging, agave-waste paper and four hundred rabbits.

Mijenta’s look was shaped from inside the founding team. Som studied architecture and interior design and ran her own design studio, VinePair reported in 2021, and in that interview she said she still works on the brand’s design; the article credits her with packaging that is pink, meant to stand out on a shelf, and printed with vegetable ink. No outside design agency is credited in the coverage cited here, so none is named.

The materials are part of the identity. At launch, The Spirits Business reported that the labels and the box were made from agave waste. When the same title reported in August 2022 that Mijenta had gained B Corp certification, it added that the labels and notecards used locally sourced agave waste from Guadalajara, that the Blanco and Reposado boxes were made from 100 per cent post-consumer recycled paper held with a single strip of glue and no coating or varnish, and that the packaging was sourced from Mexican partners. The company’s own site today says its bottles are made with recycled glass and that the box for the Añejo Gran Reserva uses material certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

The emblem has a story of its own. Mijenta says its logo draws on the Mexican legend of Mayahuel, goddess of agave, and Patecatl, god of fermentation, whose offspring were the Centzon Totochtin, the four hundred rabbits linked with celebration; its site pairs that tale with a sun and a moon, whose meeting, in another legend it retells, gave rise to the finest agave plants. The same rabbits gave their name to the Oaxacan mezcal 400 Conejos.

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.

Highland agave, an outside distillery and a growing range.

Mijenta comes from the highlands of Jalisco. The company says its agave is fully mature Blue Weber agave grown around Arandas, in mineral-rich red clay soil, and that its tequila is made using only agave, water and yeast. The brand does not describe a distillery of its own; InsideHook reported in November 2022 that the agave is distilled at Casa Tequilera de Arandas, with the work carried out under Romero’s direction, and said the spirit is double distilled, fermented with wild yeast and left unfiltered. In the United States the bottles are imported by Altos Planos Inc. of Dallas, the company’s site says, and The Spirits Business named Altos Planos as the brand’s owner in 2022.

The range has grown in steps. InsideHook dated the Reposado to December 2020 and the Añejo to spring 2022; Shanken News Daily reported in February 2024 on a limited Cristalino, made from Reposado matured in barrels built from American oak staves drawn from four states. The company’s site now also lists a limited Maestra Selection series, which it says is cooked in stone ovens and crushed with a tahona.

Sustainability is written into the company as well as the pack. The Spirits Business reported in August 2022 that Mijenta’s products were carbon-neutral through a partnership with ClimatePartner, supporting cloud-forest protection in Chiapas and wind energy in north-east Brazil, and that no pesticides or herbicides were used on its agave. The company says it also leaves a share of its agave plants to flower, to keep genetic variety in the fields.

For a design guide, Mijenta shows how a tequila launched in 2020 can build an identity from its people, its paper and a Mexican legend. Compare Tequila Ocho, the single-estate tequila from Arandas, and Clase Azul, the Guadalajara house of hand-painted decanters. For this guide we use Mijenta pink, berry and red clay with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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