The Tequila Boom Is Over at $50. Here Is What the Data – and Last Week’s Launches – Actually Tell You.

Tequila was the spirits industry’s growth story for the better part of a decade. Between 2018 and 2023, US tequila volumes grew faster than any other major spirits category. Brands at every price tier expanded. New entrants flooded in. The boom attracted investment, celebrity endorsement, and the assumption that the growth was structural rather than cyclical.

The results published across the past six weeks confirm it was both – and the cyclical part is now correcting. The three producers most exposed to the premium tequila correction have each reported significant US declines. And the most instructive data in the week just passed is not the scale of those declines. It is what each producer is doing about them. Three different strategic responses are now visible simultaneously – and each one tells you something specific about where the category is heading.

The correction confirmed – by three independent data sets