Litchfield Distillery’s Agave Spirits goes great in a margarita
A few years ago when Litchfield Distillery was looking to import a high-quality tequila to produce its canned margaritastyle cocktail, the distillery’s owners ran into a problem. “Due to Mexican export laws, they’re not allowed to export high-grade tequila [in bulk], which would be 100 percent agave,” says Jack Baker, who co-founded Litchfield Distillery in 2015 with his brothers. “They’re only allowed to export the low-grade tequila, which is 51 percent agave, 49 percent cane sugar, and it has half the flavor of 100 percent agave.”
More than 300 million blue agave plants are harvested each year in the Mexican state of Jalisco. These plants give tequila its signature rich flavors. While Baker and the team at Litchfield Distillery couldn’t import highgrade tequila, they could import 100 percent organic blue agave syrup and use that to make their own spirit — emulating tequiladistilling techniques right here in Connecticut. The resulting spirit was, and still is, used to power the distillery’s Batcherita canned cocktails which are distributed throughout the state.
As they developed the spirit for the canned cocktail, the wider potential for this smooth, agave-powered liquid began to dawn on them. “We realized we’re producing a really good agave spirit,” Baker says. “We thought it would make an excellent offering to our customers.”
The distillery released its Agave Spirits drink in 2020. Though its taste is identical to a tequila, it is not technically tequila because it’s not made in Mexico. The term “tequila” is reserved for spirits produced in and around the city of Tequila and the Jalisco region in Mexico, the same way Champagne can only be made in certain regions of France and bourbon can only be produced in the U.S.
“Trade agreements that have evolved over the years give Mexico the exclusive rights to the word ‘tequila,’ ” Baker says. “Our regulations say that we have to call it ‘agave spirit.’ ”
While these restrictions help protect the countries of origin in certain categories of spirit, it can make marketing similar products made outside those countries more difficult. But even with these tight controls, Litchfield Distillery’s agave spirit is getting noticed. It won a platinum medal at the American Spirits Council of Tasters Awards in 2021 in the white spirits/rum/tequila category.
“We use a method called slow distillation, where we use just enough heat to keep it boiling, which gives us some really good separations of the things that taste good from the things that don’t taste good, and it gives the vapors a lot of contact with copper, which makes it smoother,” Baker says. “The style that we’re selling is reposado, which means ‘rested’ in that it’s a 2month to 11-month-old tequila or agave spirit.”
In Mexico, reposado tequila is often aged in retired bourbon barrels. Those barrels are, of course, easy to come by at bourbon-producing Litchfield Distillery. “Reposado tequilas are the most popular style in Mexico and the barrel-aging process adds some nuances from the barrel, and it still allows the traditional agave flavors to come forward,” Baker says.
Litchfield Distillery also offers a rare añejo (old)-style agave spirit that is aged for 1—3 years in a wooden barrel. Litchfield’s reposado agave spirit is a worthy addition to the liquor cabinet of any tequila drinker. It has a true agave flavor, great aroma, and a smooth finish. During an informal blind taste test conducted by me for this story, it out-performed Espolòn tequila but fell just behind Herradura Silver. It also tasted excellent as a tequila stand-in in my go-to margarita and tequila and tonic recipes.
Tequila’s popularity increased in the U.S. by more than 30 percent between 2020 and 2021 and it could soon overtake vodka as the nation’s No. 1 spirit, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. For Litchfield Distillery, the agave spirit is a popular and growing part of its portfolio. “It’s an unlikely candidate for a small distillery in Connecticut, but it did evolve,” Bake says. “We didn’t start out one day to say, ‘Hey, let’s make agave spirit.’ But because we needed it, by necessity we learned how to do it.” Litchfield Distillery
569 Bantam Road, Litchfield Open daily, with tours beginning at 11 a.m.
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