Immerse yourself in a world of exceptional taste creations and experience the ultimate Texas Sotol.
Buy Desert DoorDesert Door’s story actually begins thousands of years ago. The archeological record shows the indigenous people of what is now West Texas using the sotol plant to create a fermented beverage. Centuries later, prohibition-era Texans made moonshine from the spiky plant.
So what is sotol, exactly? Sotol is both the name of our distilled spirit and the plant that it’s made from. The sotol plant is a bright green succulent with a tall shooting stalk that grows wild all over the Chihuahua desert. The founders of Desert Door first happened upon sotol while hunting the Trans-Pecos. The more they learned about the hardy desert plant, the more fascinated they became.
There is no recipe for the sotol spirit; our founders formulated Desert Door’s proprietary process through a lot of trial and error. While there are similarities between sotol and tequila, the sotol plant is not an agave (different family, genus and species). Consequently, Desert Door is not a tequila or mezcal but lives in a category of its own. We call it Texas Sotol. You’ll call it unique, earthy, and delicious.
There’s no handbook on how to make sotol. Desert Door’s process was arrived at mostly through trial and error. Granted, much of the methodology is based on distillation practices that date back to the Middle Ages.
There, we’ll walk you through our whole process, from wild-harvesting to cooking and aging and bottling. At the end of the tour, you can order a few cocktails in our tasting room with a whole new appreciation for what goes into making our unique liquor.
Figuring out how to harvest and process the sotol plant, how to properly extract the sugars, divining the right cooking temperatures and times - let’s just say there was a lot of liquor squandered before landing on what we now proudly call Desert Door Texas Sotol.
If you’d like to hear more about how we make Texas Sotol and see for yourself how we turn a desert plant into a complex, flavorful spirit, be sure and book a tour of our distillery in Driftwood.
