Chicago Tequila Brands You Should Know

Inspiro was founded in 2020 by Mara Smith and is headquartered in Illinois, which also became the brand's first retail market in 2022. It is a women-owned and women-led company, and its liquid is produced in Mexico — as all tequila must be.

Production involves Maestra Tequilera Ana Maria Romero, one of the most recognized sensory and production experts working in agave spirits. That matters more than a founder story: the person shaping the liquid is a specialist, not a marketing hire.

Macizo is built on an explicit two-city premise: a brand shaped by Chicago entrepreneurship and a spirit made in Jalisco. That framing is worth taking seriously rather than treating it as a slogan — it describes exactly how a city with no distilleries can still have a real stake in tequila.

We publish production specifics for Macizo only as we verify them directly with the brand or from primary documentation. Where you see a blank here, it means we haven't confirmed it yet — not that it doesn't exist.

Founder Luis Cruz is an 18th-generation Jalisco native. According to the brand's own account, the idea for Luna Nueva took shape after an experience at a Chicago bar, where the tequila being poured didn't reflect the spirit he remembered from home.

It is about as clean a Chicago/Jalisco narrative as the category offers: a Jalisco palate encountering the American market, and deciding to build the bottle it was missing.

Arturo Lomeli comes from a family with generations of agave-spirit production history, and Lost Lore is built on that inheritance rather than on a new marketing idea. Stone and brick ovens, a roller mill, stainless fermentation with champagne yeast, copper pot stills, double distillation, no additives in the blanco.

We review the liquid in our Top 5. This card is about the people: a family lineage in Los Altos de Jalisco, a brand with real footing in Chicago's craft spirits community, and a decision to make tequila the slow way in a market that rewards the opposite.