Happy Friday! We are back with even more developments in this wild tequila scandal. Felisa Rogers at Mezcalistas released an update on the ordeal on the 18th and the contents may be slightly shocking. This week we will try to update you on what’s new without rehashing too much of what we have already covered. For those of you who have only recently joined us I will link all of our past coverage along with all of our source material (spoiler: the source material is almost entirely Rogers at Mezcalistas).

There’s a lot to unpack here, so to do justice to the scope of this reporting I’m dedicating this entire newsletter to the story.

The Tequila Adulteration Scandal Continues to Snowball

In this latest update from Felisa Rogers at Mezcalistas, all four of the previously mentioned but intentionally unnamed tequila brands were revealed along with actual images of the test results from Eurofins.

Rogers has been working closely with Remberto Galván, an advocate for agave farmers (agaveros), to cover this huge ordeal and to give voice to the people who first cried foul back in 2024. Rogers added as a note in her article: “Galván was previously the spokesperson for the Mexican Agave Council (CMXDA) and currently represents a group called Agaveros 100 por ciento de Origen Mexicano. He has been fighting for the rights of field workers (jornaleros) and farmers (agaveros) since he was a teenage crew leader working in the agave fields for Jose Cuervo.” She has always made sure to emphasize in her reporting the very real danger that Galván and others like him are in by continuing to stand against big tequila and the CRT.

In the above linked article Rogers recaps the entire timeline of events as concisely as possible. If you’re just joining us please give her article a read, she is the preeminent reporter on this developing story. For those of you following this from our reporting I will pick up where we left off two weeks ago. After Costco was hit with a class action lawsuit, blindsiding Galván who had been working to keep the names of the brands classified for the time being, the next brand named was Lunazul (referred to in the article as “Luna Azul“, this one felt like a personal loss 🥲.) Lunazul, owned by Heaven Hill, is a very popular ‘well’ tequila in the US. In fact, the US is responsible for the majority of the brand’s sales so it being on the adulterated list is very relevant for American bars and bartenders.

After two of the four brands had been somehow leaked and were already included in lawsuits in the US, Galván authorized the release of the other two brands’ names. Don Ramón Plata Diamante and Centenario Plata (made by Cuervo) are the two previously withheld from the formal reporting. The brands were not being named directly in an effort not to impede investigation by Mexican authorities and for Galván’s own protection.

Health and Safety is at Risk as Regulations Slip

If you missed our newsletter explaining the type of testing that is being used to verify the purity of these tequilas check it out here. I tried to give a condensed explanation of the process and the science behind it. The latest reporting shows images of the actual test results from Eurofins in France of the bottles purchased in Mexico by Galván. The image itself is not necessarily enlightening unless you know what to look for, but it does serve to give credibility to the claims of adulteration in the public sphere.

One of the more alarming results to come out of these tests is that the sample of Don Julio actually contained nearly twice the legally allowed amount of methanol. Methanol is an inevitable byproduct of distillation of any kind but it has very damaging health effects at high levels. According to Carbotecnia “The standard establishes a maximum methanol content of 300 mg per 100 ml of anhydrous alcohol. It only presents an exception for whiskey and cognac drinks where the maximum allowable limit is 1000 mg of methanol per 100 ml of anhydrous alcohol.” Thankfully the rates detected don’t seem to fall into the immediately dangerous range since “it has been established that the potentially lethal dose of methanol is approximately 30 to 240 ml or 1 g per kilogram.”

What these levels could mean (by my own conjecture) is that these big tequila brands are looking to cut costs even further by using the “heads and tails” of the distillate. The first and last portions of any distilled spirit are the ones with the highest concentration of methanol and so are not included in the final consumable product. This means there will always be volume lost in production as it is essentially “cooked off”. In unregulated alcohol production (like moonshine in the US) one of the biggest risks to consumers is methanol poisoning. The purpose of regulatory bodies in the alcohol industry is to hold producers to the established standards for health and safety among other things.

The Human Impact of These Allegations and Coverups

The most important thing to remember in all of this is why Rogers, Galván, and others are speaking out in the first place. The people that are being hurt the most by this are the small, independent agave farmers. Rogers in her own words: “But to me, the agaveros are still at the heart of this drama. In a nutshell: this is a story about giant corporations allegedly colluding with a regulatory agency to improve their profit margins. By allegedly adulterating tequila with industrial alcohol, these players are devaluing the price of agave. This is unfair to both the agaveros and the legitimate distillers who are still making real tequila with care and at much greater cost.”

By her own admission tequila adulteration can seem like a superficial concern to readers, especially when we are living in a hellscape of human atrocities, but reporting like this is still very important in the wider scope. When big corporations get to write their own rulebook the cost is not only in dollars. The people and families that have tended the agave fields responsible for this beloved spirit for hundreds of years are at risk of losing their livelihoods and family legacies. As corporate greed continues to crush the modest profits these farmers work so hard for silence is complicity. This is not a story of how tequila consumers are being mislead, although that is a part of it, it is a story of how corporations are blatantly lying about the content of their products to gain a near total monopoly.

Galván has already been physically harmed in retaliation of his advocacy. He was abducted and beaten, has received numerous death threats, and recently was made aware of attempts to frame his own distillery for adulteration in an effort to destroy his credibility in the matter. We hope that he and all others involved in this advocacy remain safe.

I am also compelled to include Galván’s own words to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum via Rogers: “Today I leave my life in the hands of the President of the Republic and ask that she carry out the shared prosperity she speaks of so much–with the elimination of monopolies in Mexico. I ask that the rule of law be conducted with clarity and with respect for the evidence we have provided, and I ask for an end to this corruption.*” (“*Upon Remberto’s request, this is a modified version of his original quotation.” - Felisa Rogers)

These conversations are important to have in the bar and restaurant industry. Language has a huge impact on the experience of guests and carefully choosing how your establishment frames its base spirits is a smart move. This industry is constantly refining the guest experience and guests are increasingly more knowledgeable about the products that they consume. Using language that reflects the thoughtfulness put into the selection of the default spirit bases helps reassure guests that lower costs aren’t always equated to lower quality.

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