Teremana

At a glance

Teremana is a tequila brand produced under NOM 1613NOM (Norma Oficial Mexicana) is the Mexican federal product-standard system. On a tequila bottle the NOM number is the unique identifier of the distillery facility where the tequila was made — every drop in the bottle came from a plant operating under that NOM. Different brands made at the same NOM share a distillery. NOM 1613: Destilería Teremana de Agave, S.A. de C.V. (Jesús María, Arandas, Jalisco, Los Altos). A single-brand NOM dedicated to Teremana; production run by the López family of agave growers., the facility code for Destilería Teremana de Agave in Jesús María, near Arandas, in the Los Altos (highlands) region of Jalisco. The brand was founded in 2020 by the actor and former wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, together with the drinks-industry veterans Ken Austin and Jenna Fagnan. Johnson is a genuine founder-owner here, not a paid face attached to a finished product.

Teremana is worth understanding for one reason above all: it is the celebrity tequila that did almost everything the opposite way to Casamigos. Where Casamigos was contract-produced at a shared, multi-brand facility and then sold to a multinational, Teremana built its own distillery, makes only its own brand there, and remains independently owned. That contrast is the most useful thing a reader can take from this page.

A single-brand NOM, and what that means

Every certified tequila bottle carries a four-digit NOM identifying the distillery that made it. Many brands share a facility, contract-producing alongside a dozen others under the same NOM. Teremana does not. NOM 1613NOM (Norma Oficial Mexicana) is the Mexican federal product-standard system. On a tequila bottle the NOM number is the unique identifier of the distillery facility where the tequila was made — every drop in the bottle came from a plant operating under that NOM. Different brands made at the same NOM share a distillery. NOM 1613: Destilería Teremana de Agave, S.A. de C.V. (Jesús María, Arandas, Jalisco, Los Altos). A single-brand NOM dedicated to Teremana; production run by the López family of agave growers. is a single-brand NOM: the distillery exists to make Teremana and only Teremana.

That is a meaningful structural difference from a contract brand. Casamigos, for comparison, is made at a shared facility that has bottled several other labels over the years. A single-brand distillery means the brand controls its own production from the ground rather than buying time on someone else's stills, and it is closer to the owner-operator model of houses like Fortaleza or Tequila Ocho than the celebrity-licensing model. A single-brand NOM does not by itself prove higher quality, but it does mean the production story is the brand's own to tell and answer for.

How it is made, and by whom

The distillery is operated by the López family, third-generation agave growers and second-generation distillers, who run the day-to-day production. The hands-on craft narrative is therefore attached to a real local family with a long agave lineage, not to the celebrity name on the label.

The brand publicly describes traditional methods at a deliberately modest equipment scale: agave cooked in 24-ton brick ovens (small ovens for a brand of this volume) and distilled in 3,800-litre copper pot stills. The agave is highland Agave tequilana Weber azul from Los Altos, which tends toward a sweeter, softer, more approachable profile. Because the brand combines those traditional, small-batch methods with large overall output, this site treats its production style as a hybrid of craft technique and industrial scale rather than a purely small-batch operation.

Brick ovens, copper stills, and no diffuser claim

The reason the equipment matters is that it speaks to a transparency question that follows every fast-growing tequila: does scale come from an industrial shortcut? The most discussed shortcut is the diffuser, a machine that strips sugars from milled agave with hot water rather than slow oven-cooking.

There is no cited evidence that Teremana uses a diffuser, and the brand publicly describes brick ovens and copper pot stills, which are traditional, non-diffuser methods. This site therefore makes no diffuser claim about Teremana and records its diffuser confidence as low, meaning there is no credible signal of diffuser use to report. As with any brand, the absence of an additive-free certification is not the same as evidence of additives; it simply means no third-party body has verified the point, and tequila's standard (NOM-006-SCFI-2012A regulatory-standard NOM is a federal Mexican product norm. Unlike facility NOMs (4-digit identifiers of specific distilleries), a standard NOM defines the rules for an entire category of product: which raw materials are permitted, where the product may be made, how it must be processed, and how the bottle must be labeled. Standard NOMs are written as "NOM-XXX-SCFI-YYYY" where XXX is the standard number and YYYY is the year. NOM-006-SCFI-2012 (Tequila). The official Mexican standard governing every aspect of Tequila production: which agave species may be used (only Agave tequilana Weber var. azul), which states and municipalities qualify, how the spirit must be distilled, what additives are permitted (up to 1% by volume even in '100% agave' bottles), and how the bottle must be labeled. Enforced by the Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT).) permits small undisclosed additions of colouring, sweetener, oak extract, and glycerin without forcing them onto the label.

What is in the range

The volume leader is the Blanco (the unaged, clear expression, bottled soon after distillation). The Reposado (rested a few months in oak) and the Añejo (aged longer, at least a year) are the core aged expressions, and a Cristalino (an aged tequila filtered back to clarity through charcoal) extends the line. The Cristalino category across the whole industry is the one where production transparency is weakest, because filtration removes both colour and some of the evidence of what was added during ageing; that is a category-wide caution, not a Teremana-specific allegation.

Scale, fast

Teremana grew unusually quickly. It surpassed one million cases sold per year by 2022, a pace the brand has marketed as making it the "fastest-growing tequila of all time."

That speed is what makes the ownership contrast pointed. A brand growing this fast is exactly the kind of asset a multinational acquires, as Diageo did with Casamigos. Teremana, as of this writing, has not been sold. Mast-Jägermeister SE, the German company behind the Jägermeister liqueur, handles Teremana's distribution, but that is a distribution arrangement, not an acquisition: the brand remains independently owned, and the distillery and brand are not a Mast-Jägermeister asset the way Casamigos is a Diageo one.

Where Teremana sits

Teremana shares the celebrity-founder DNA of Casamigos, a famous owner who built rather than merely fronted the brand, but it diverges on the two things that matter most to production literacy: it owns its own single-brand distillery instead of contracting at a shared facility, and it has stayed independent instead of selling to a multinational. Read against Casamigos on one side and the owner-operator houses like Fortaleza and Tequila Ocho on the other, Teremana sits in an interesting middle: large-scale and famous like the former, but structurally rooted in its own distillery and family operation like the latter.

See also