Most agave is harvested too young.
It's an open secret in the tequila industry. Global demand has grown so fast, and agave takes so long to mature, that the economics of patience have become difficult to defend. Plants that once spent a decade in the ground are being pulled at five or six years. The sugars aren't fully developed. The complexity isn't there. The resulting tequila is thinner, sharper, easier to produce and easier to drink through quickly, which, for most of the market, is fine.
For an añejo, it isn't fine. An aged tequila earns its time in the barrel only if the spirit going in is worth ageing. Which is why where 818 starts matters.
Six to seven years before anything else
818's distillery partner in Amatitán, Jalisco is the largest grower of organic Blue Weber agave in Mexico. Their jimadores; skilled agave farmers whose knowledge of the land is generational, identify plants in the Los Valles region and wait. Six to seven years, until the agave has reached peak maturity and the piñas are ready to be harvested.
From there, the process is deliberately traditional. The harvested piñas are slow-cooked for 30 or more hours in twenty-ton brick ovens at 96 degrees Celsius. Then they meet the tahonas, stone wheels weighing 800 kilograms each, which crush the cooked agave to extract the juice in the way it has been done for centuries.
The extracted juice, called mosto, ferments for 70 hours in wood and stainless steel tanks, using leftover agave fibers from the tahonas and native yeast. Distillation follows twice in hand-built copper alembic pot stills, first to 24% ABV, then to 48%, with precise cuts made at each stage. Then the Añejo finds its barrels: American and French oak, aged at still strength, until the distillers decide it's ready.
Every step is slower and more labour-intensive than it needs to be. That's the point.
What patience actually tastes like
The 818 Añejo Reserve doesn't taste like the tequila most people think they know. The nose is warm and unhurried; caramel, vanilla, roasted agave, a quiet touch of toasted oak. The palate opens up into something silky and full-bodied: honeyed agave, baking spices, dried fruits, oak richness that layers rather than dominates. The finish is long and smooth, with vanilla and sweet oak persisting well after the glass is empty.
The Ultimate Spirits Challenge scored it 96 points and named it best in its class. Across all 818 expressions, the brand has taken 43 blind tasting awards across 13 international competitions. In blind tastings, there is no label to recognise, no brand to defer to. The liquid earns it or it doesn't.
The other side of production
818's distillery runs on biomass and solar power. The agave fibers and liquid waste left after production, material that most operations simply discard, are combined with adobe soil and converted into bricks. Those bricks have been used to build a community library in Zapotitlán de Vadillo, classroom spaces, and a gathering area in Jalisco. 818 is a certified B Corporation and a 1% for the Planet member, contributing a portion of every sale to environmental nonprofits.
These details won't change how the Añejo tastes. But they're worth knowing about, because a spirit that is produced this carefully, from the ground up, tends to reflect that care in the glass.