Why we put the NOM on the front of everything

It sits near the bottom of the back label, next to the importer information and the government warning, in type sized for compliance rather than communication. Technically disclosed. Functionally invisible.

We went the other way. Ours is on the can in type you can read from across a room, on the website, on the social posts, and in a campaign built entirely around telling people to check it.

A few people have asked why. It’s a fair question — it’s a regulatory identifier, not a flavor.

Because a claim you can check is worth more than one you can’t

Every brand in this category says the same words. Premium. Authentic. Real. Craft. Small batch. They cost nothing to print and they mean whatever the reader wants them to mean.

A NOM is different in one specific way: it’s falsifiable.

Four digits, a public registry, thirty seconds. You can verify it without asking us anything, and if we were lying you’d find out immediately. That’s a fundamentally different kind of claim than “authentic,” and we’d rather stake the brand on the kind that can be checked.

The uncomfortable version of this: any brand could do it. Most don’t, and we think that’s information too.

Because the alternative was making noise

We could have spent the launch budget saying “real tequila” louder than everyone else saying “real tequila.” That’s the normal playbook and it mostly works by attrition.

But there’s a better version available, which is to teach people something genuinely useful and let them draw their own conclusion. Somebody who learns what a NOM is doesn’t just learn something about us — they learn something that changes how they read every can in the cooler, permanently.

That’s a much stickier thing than an ad. And it happens to advantage the brands with nothing to hide.

Because we’re willing to say what it doesn’t prove

This is the part that took the longest to get right internally.

The dishonest version of this campaign would treat a NOM as a quality badge. It isn’t. A NOM tells you which facility made the spirit — not whether it’s any good. Excellent and forgettable tequilas share distilleries all the time.

It isn’t exclusive either. There are roughly 360 certified producers and around 2,600 registered brands, so contract production is standard practice throughout the category, including at its very top. Sharing a NOM is completely normal. Hiding one isn’t.

We say all of that out loud, on our own education page, in a section titled “What a NOM doesn’t tell you.”

The reasoning is simple. If we oversell the number, the first person who does five minutes of research catches us — and then everything else we’ve said is suspect too. Volunteering the limits is what makes the rest of it credible.

Because “check the can” has to include our can

The campaign only works in one direction if it’s honest.

We aren’t telling people to check other brands’ cans and find them wanting. We’re telling people to check cans. Ours included, first, most loudly. The instruction we give is the same instruction we’d want given to us.

If that means someone looks up NOM 1658, sees which other brands come out of the same facility, and forms their own opinion — good. That’s the system working. We’d rather compete with informed drinkers than uninformed ones, because informed drinkers are the ones who notice the difference between a tequila seltzer built on 100% real tequila and one built on a malt base.

The short version

We put the number on everything because it’s the one claim on the can that doesn’t require trusting us.

Everything else — real ingredients, real flavor, no shortcuts — you have to take on faith until you taste it. The NOM you can verify before you open it.

Ours is 1658. Go ahead.

#CheckTheCan

Figures reflect CRT registry data current as of 2026.