The animal on the label
El Jabalí
hah‑bah‑LEE · the wild boar
The brand name
Tusk’ave
Tusk + Agave
The tusk that opens the agave gave the house its name.
The jabalí can barely see. It has almost no eyesight at all, and it has never needed any. It finds its way with its nose. It can smell a root buried under three inches of soil. And what it goes looking for is agave.
Then it does something we love. It ignores the leaves. It ignores the spines. It ignores the whole tall plant that everyone else notices. It pushes into the middle, opens the plant with its tusks, and takes the heart. The piña. The one part that matters. The exact part we cook, ferment and lay into these casks.
That is why it is on our label. Not because it is noble or beautiful, but because it knows exactly where the value of the agave is, and it goes straight to it.
We are the same animal.
We are a small house, and we come from the country that gave this spirit to the world. We have watched it travel further than any of us expected, and we have watched it get simpler on the way. What we want to give you is the opposite of simple. We want to give you the heart.
Tequila is a Mexican work of art.
We built Tusk’ave so it could be tasted in more than one way.
What is crossing the border
In the last ten years our spirit has travelled further than in the whole century before it. We watched that happen with real pride. But look at what is crossing the border. Aged tequila has been made uniform: one alcohol strength, one flavour, so that every bottle can promise to taste exactly like the last one.
We believe a work of art deserves something different.
We are not here to correct anybody. We are here because we love this spirit too much to watch it arrive anywhere as a copy of itself, and because the people who grow the agave and cook it deserve to be tasted, not averaged.
We use mature agave, six years or more in the ground, cut by hand. That is what makes our amazing additive-free blanco, and that blanco is all we ever lay into wood. Our maestro tequilero, with more than twenty-five years of experience, then selects the barrels himself. That selection is the signature of every aged tequila we release.
The three oaks
Casks chosen and filled, resting in the bodega
Each one in three levels of toast. Toasting is the burning of the inside of the barrel, and every level draws something different out of the same tequila. Three woods, three toasts, nine different results from one tequila. And then comes the hardest part of all.
We wait.
We let the altitude, the humidity, the hot days and the cold nights of the Highlands do what they have always done. There is no way to hurry it, and no reason to want to.
This is where Mexico enters the bottle. Not as a story printed on a label, but as air, and time, and place, working on the wood, for years.
The one rule nobody here may break
The cooked agave must still be there.
Oak gives a lot, and it never stops giving. Leave a tequila in the barrel too long and the wood takes over completely. What is left in the glass is pleasant, and woody, and could have come from anywhere in the world.
A barrel comes out when the wood has given everything it has and you can still taste the cooked agave underneath it. Not one day later. We are not making a wood-flavoured drink that began as tequila. We are making tequila.
Only the maestro tequilero calls that moment, and only he then sets the alcohol strength that barrel has earned. One cask at a time. Never a number chosen once in an office and forced onto everything that follows.
So no two casks are ever the same. A different number of bottles. Different aromas. Different flavours. A different strength.
No two casks the same. None of them repeatable.
The bridge
A tequila lover, a bourbon drinker and a whisky drinker can each find their own barrel here. All three will be tasting the same thing: agave, honestly.
That is the bridge we set out to build. Between cultures. Between tastes. Between people who would never have sat at the same table.
And what we want to give you is a reason to stay at that table a little longer. To pour slowly. To notice that the barrel in your glass happened once, and will not happen again, and that for as long as it lasts it is yours.