Desnuda’s Brandon Korthuis Talks Tequila

Desnuda is a tequila brand that was born in Indiana with roots in Mexican Agave. After a change of hands late last year, the organic tequila brand is expanding with eyes on major strategic partnerships and growth to meet a national audience.

EDIBLE INDY: So walk me through the Indiana ties and the partnerships that you have here. It feels like Desnuda is growing very quickly right in our back yard.

BRANDON KORTHUIS: It kind of started in Indiana, and then obviously our owners who acquired it are Indiana based, and had some of those relationships. And we said, “Hey, we think this brand is great, the product is great. We want to take it over, but we want to do it a little differently.” We wanted to make it more of a consumer facing brand and product. We wanted people to really look at the bottle, and point to it from behind the bar. And that’s what we did.

EI: And you’ve had some major partnerships in that time, too.

BK: We are partners of the Indianapolis Colts. That was the first partnership we did, and through that, we realized what an awesome opportunity it was for our branding. It gives us the amazing potential to walk into bars or restaurants and say, “Hey, we’re an official partner of them.” But then we started to think, how do we expand from that?

So you take the biggest teams, so we have Indianapolis Colts, Indianapolis Pacers, which are the two big sports teams. We also have Indy Eleven for soccer and Indianapolis Indians for baseball. And we have Butler University, which is a bigger partnership for our larger ecosystem. It is really cool to see, and it integrates everything we’re doing, not just the tequila. But yes, we have a partnership with Butler, and then also with Clowes Hall.

EI: And what do those partnerships mean? What do they do for the person ordering a shot at the bar?

BK: For the brand, it’s an opportunity for us to showcase who we are, what we’re doing. It also is an instant placement for us.

The other thing that it does—and this is where we really see impact on the growth, and this is where the consumer benefits is—we get opportunities to be in front of large groups of people and do liquid-to-lip-style tasting. We now have so many people walking by getting the opportunity to sample our product and then either go buy a cocktail from the bar or just become familiar with our tequila outside of just seeing it on a big billboard.

I think, also, for us at Desnuda, it’s all about letting people know that we are an organic tequila. We’re a differentiator in the tequila market, because most of the tequila you’re drinking is like a mixed dough, which means it’s not 100% agave. Even if it is 100% agave, there’s less emphasis on the quality side of things, and it’s more commercialized. That’s where we try to be a little bit different with our closed fermentation process that we utilized out in Mexico. Our master distiller, Santos, is really just an expert at what he does. He’s like an evil genius in a Mad Chemist kind of way.

EI: So what was the inspiration behind the brand, where it is today? Where did that come from?

BK: When I decided to take over the brand for Desnuda, I spent some time in prayer, and one of the things that the Lord showed me was, he gave me a vision of the communion table. It was people sitting and eating and drinking and being together. That’s what he saw for me, I walked out of that vision thinking, this is not meant to be shy. This is meant to be sipped and enjoyed and create conversation over. Put the phones away, let’s just be humans. Let’s just be people. I’ve really leaned into that.

Also, it’s a premium tequila, like, you’re just not going to shoot a premium tequila. You’re spending way too much money on that to shoot it. I’m happy for people to shoot it, by all means, we can run through product a lot faster, but it was never designed like that. When you go back to the history of tequila, tequila was never meant to be shot. Everybody who consumes and drinks tequila in Mexico, they sip it. They always have. They probably always will. It’s definitely an American culture thing to shoot tequila.

EI: You mentioned the organic element. For the older crowd, it feels like there’s a movement, whether it’s accurate or not, toward liquors as a healthier sipping option rather than packing on the heavy IPAs. Is that something you factor into Desnuda’s messaging?

BK: 100% I think that’s a big part. And even the old tagline was always, ‘Drink Naked’. I think the whole message behind that was, like, this is a tequila that won’t give you a hangover.

And honestly, there’s a ton of truth to that. There’s something about the way your body is able to break down tequila versus a corn-based alcohol or sugar-based alcohol. There’s no fillers or additives inside our tequila that are ultimately giving you the hangovers. We’re more interested in the sit and sip, which to your point is more popular now than just consume, consume, consume.

I think a lot of people have a really bad perception of tequila because of the experiences they have had in their younger days in college, and maybe even before college, when you shot tequila, and now they catch a whiff of one of those brands and they think, “Oh God, I remember that night” We wanted to totally change that perception. And also, our tequila is excellent, and I think it deserves more than a shot. It deserves to be in its own glass.