G4 Tequila Blanco

A blanco never sees a barrel, so there's nothing to hide behind, and G4's is the one we reach for when we want to taste what careful, old-school tequila-making does to agave. The Camarena family has made tequila since 1937 (G4 stands for four generations), and today Felipe Camarena and his sons run El Pandillo distillery in Jesús María, Jalisco, using agave from their own ranches. The process is stubbornly traditional. The bitter central shoot of each agave, the cogollo, is cut out by hand. The agave then roasts for 28 hours in stone ovens, gets crushed by a tahona nicknamed "Felipestein," ferments with the grandfather's own agave yeast and is double-distilled in copper pot stills. Then there's the water: just over half is captured rainwater, and the rest is mountain spring water from the ranch. Felipe says he's in the business of making great tequila, not fancy bottles, and you can taste it. There are no artificial ingredients and no gimmicks, just an honest benchmark blanco that works as well in a Paloma as it does sipped neat.