This Tequila Is So Exclusive You Have To Apply To Drink It

You can drink it neat or use it to make a margarita (Jennifer Aniston's favorite cocktail). You can buy it from Jose Cuervo, Tres Agaves, or one of the many brands owned by celebrities. It's a drink so fun that they named a bopping surf rock instrumental after it and had Pee Wee Herman dance to it. Tequila is a delightful, versatile, frequently misunderstood spirit, and one that has been historically pretty easy to get one's hands on. But there's a new, hyper-luxurious brand of tequila coming out — one that's so exclusive you have to fill out an application to even be considered to taste it.

It's called Tequila Purísima, and it's the brainchild of Brent Hocking, an entrepreneur who has become a big name in the high-end liquor market. (He's a frequent collaborator with Drake, which honestly explains a lot about this whole situation.) Tequila Purísima sells itself as the best of the best, made in small batches with very high-quality ingredients; the whole bit with the application, then, is a way to reinforce the tequila's rarity. Hocking specifically contrasts this quality-first approach with the myriad of celebrity-endorsed tequilas that have saturated the market, which we guess is a noble enough aim. Still, the brand's landing page, with its tagline "for those who know better" and its button asking you to "request consideration", is a little much. At least George Clooney didn't ask us to prove our worth before he deigned to sell us hooch, y'know?

It is, admittedly, quite easy to make fun of a tequila presented with such self-important gravitas, especially when it comes in a bottle with such a...erm, suggestive shape. (We freely admit to not knowing the best practices when it comes to shaping tequila bottles, but none of the other ones we've seen are shaped like something you'd buy at a Spencer's in the mall.) But just because tequila is a relatively inexpensive liquor to produce doesn't mean it's okay to put aside quality altogether, which plenty of celebrity-endorsed liquors, tequila or otherwise, have done far too often.

Hocking's product is made in a single distillery in Mexico from agave plants with an exceptionally high sugar count, and the cooking process takes three days. You certainly can't say that care wasn't taken to provide a quality product — but you certainly can't say it's cheap, either. A single bottle of Tequila Purisima blanco costs $400, which is very expensive for tequila. (For context, Hocking's previous excursion into tequila blanco was sold for $150 a bottle, which was itself considered an eye-popping figure at the time.) It's entirely possible that the product is worth the price, but us hoi polloi probably won't be able to find out.