A brewery opened in Tacuba in 1925.

Modelo takes its name from Cervecería Modelo, the brewery that opened in Mexico City on 25 October 1925, the date Grupo Modelo gives for its Mexico City plant. Its founders were businessmen born in Spain. Spanish Wikipedia names Braulio Iriarte as president, with Pablo Díez and the brothers Martín and Miguel Oyamburu Arce, and both English and Spanish Wikipedia describe a group of 25 Spanish immigrants behind the venture; Iriarte owned bakeries and the Molino Euzkaro flour mill, and Martín Oyamburu was an industrialist and banker.

Constellation Brands, which sells Modelo in the United States, tells the story a little differently. Its website says it began in 1922 in Tacuba, which it calls a small town, when twelve men led by Braulio Iriarte Goyeneche came together to set up the brewery. It says the opening day in 1925 drew more than 10,000 people, including President Plutarco Elías Calles and his cabinet, and that the first beer poured was Negra, the dark lager now sold as Modelo Negra. Constellation’s centenary press release of September 2025 describes Modelo as “born in 1925 in the small town of Tacuba.”

The founders’ circle changed in the following decade. Spanish Wikipedia says that by 1936 the Oyamburu brothers and Pablo Díez had become the brewery’s only partners after buying out Iriarte’s heirs. Díez, from León in Spain, was president from 1932 until 1971, when his nephew Antonino Fernández Rodríguez took over as chairman and chief executive; Fernández stayed chief executive until 1997 and chairman until 2005, the same article says.

Especial, Negra and a run of slogans.

The brewery grew by buying rivals. In 1935 it bought the Compañía Cervecera de Toluca y México, maker of Victoria, and Spanish Wikipedia says it marked the purchase with newspaper notices declaring “La Victoria es nuestra” (“Victory is ours”), the origin of the beer’s current slogan. In 1954 it bought the Cervecería del Pacífico in Mazatlán and La Estrella in Guadalajara, and later built or bought plants across Mexico, among them the Zacatecas brewery at Calera, which Grupo Modelo dates to April 1997.

Sources disagree about when Modelo Especial, the pilsner-style lager Constellation calls the brand’s most popular beer, first appeared. English Wikipedia, citing Grupo Modelo’s own website in 2011, says it was first bottled in 1925; Constellation’s website says the brewery introduced Modelo Especial in 1966. Spanish Wikipedia records that in 1966 Modelo began producing quick-chilling cans, called “frescobotes,” for Modelo Especial. Constellation lists Modelo Negra as a Munich dunkel-style lager and Modelo Oro as a light beer, and says it launched Chelada Especial, the brand’s first chelada, in 2013.

Advertising has been part of the story for most of a century. Spanish Wikipedia says that in 1943 the company used the line “20 millones de mexicanos NO pueden estar equivocados” (“20 million Mexicans can’t be wrong”), and that in 1953 and 1954 its advertising brought in caricaturists to draw actors, journalists, athletes and writers. English Wikipedia says that until the 1960s Grupo Modelo used red poppy flowers in most of its advertising.

In the United States the brand voice is Constellation’s. Its website presents Modelo Especial as a beer for those with “The Fighting Spirit,” and repeats a line about the founders: “it doesn’t matter where you come from; what matters is what you’re made of.” For the centenary in September 2025 it launched a campaign called “Thank You for 100 Years of Modelo,” with outdoor advertising in cities including Dallas, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York and Miami, a hand-painted mural by the artist Snoeman in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and limited “1-in-6” packs, each with one hand-painted bottle, designed that year by Devon Rodriguez and Henry Beltran, the company says.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Mexican beer brands: Modelo, Pacifico, Dos Equis, Victoria, Bohemia, Indio and Carta Blanca. Mexican beer brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that began at a single regional brewery to names that now belong to much larger international brewing groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a label, a name and the bottle or can it comes in, 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 beer is actually brewed and packed.

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

One beer, two owners, divided by a border.

Grupo Modelo became a public company in February 1994, listing 13 per cent of its capital on the Mexican stock exchange, Spanish Wikipedia says. Anheuser-Busch InBev already held a non-controlling 50 per cent stake when, in June 2012, AB InBev announced that it would buy the rest. The US Department of Justice sued to block the deal in January 2013; the case was settled, and the merger was completed in June 2013, the St. Louis Business Journal reported, with all of Grupo Modelo’s US business transferred to Constellation Brands. Constellation had already imported the beers through Crown Imports, a joint venture formed with Grupo Modelo in January 2007.

The result is one brand with two owners. In Mexico and the rest of the world, Modelo belongs to Grupo Modelo, a subsidiary of AB InBev with its head office in Mexico City. In the United States, Constellation holds a perpetual licence to the Corona and Modelo brands and brews the beers in Mexico at its own breweries in Nava, Coahuila, and Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, English Wikipedia says; Modelo’s US website says simply “Brewed in Nava, Mexico.” Grupo Modelo lists breweries in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Mazatlán, Torreón, Zacatecas, Tuxtepec in Oaxaca, Hunucmá in Yucatán and Apan in Hidalgo.

In June 2023 the Wall Street Journal and the BBC reported that Modelo Especial had become the best-selling beer in the United States by retail dollar sales, overtaking Bud Light, a ranking Constellation repeated in its September 2025 centenary announcement.

For a design guide, Modelo shows how a brewery’s name can carry a century of slogans and a split between two owners. Compare Corona, the clear-bottle lager from the same Mexico City brewery, and Pacífico, the Mazatlán beer Modelo bought in 1954. For this guide we use a navy, a foil gold and a crest red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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