Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage (or food) that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
You’ve probably seen Komos tequilas before, even if you don’t realize it. They’re the premium-priced Mexican spirit in ceramic bottles that look either like an elongated bell or the Iron Sheik’s old Persian clubs, depending on how old and/or wrestling-infected your brain is.
My press kit didn’t come with those big, beautiful bottles, which makes a lot of sense because shipping $400 of alcohol through the mail is a pretty big risk. But I still wound up with three of Komos’s best sellers — a reposado aged in wine casks, a cristalino that leans into the growing trend of purer, clearer tequilas and an anejo. A quick run through my local Woodman’s suggests the price on these fifths *starts* at a shade over $100, which, hooooo buddy.
Can Komos live up to that price tag? There’s only one way to find out.
Let’s start with the tequila that’s closest to my beloved bourbon. A barrel aged reposado offers a mellower sip thanks to oaky flavors imparted from a few months of barrel-aging. You get a little bit of that from the smell wafting off the pour. It’s buttery, a little fruity and a little spicy. It doesn’t seem especially fancy, but that’s tough to parse from a sniff alone.
The first sip is sweet and fruity. There’s a little burn toward the end. The space between is … kinda hollow. There’s a place there for spice or vanilla or oak or stone fruit and instead you just get a little pale agave and not much else.
The end result is a bit generic. For a spirit aged in French wine casks you don’t get much of that influence. It’s not bad by any means, it’s just not anything you’d remember after the fact. “Have you tried Komos?” “Yes.” “How was it?” “Tequila.”
That’s not a problem, except, well, you probably want more for $130 per bottle. It’s just sorta boring.
It pours clear as expected. There’s a little patchy stickiness on the side of the glass, It lacks the buttery, fruity smell of the Reposado Rosa. It’s a little boozy but, strangely, doesn’t smell like tequila. Between that and the lack of color, there’s a minor vodka vibe to this. Dig your nose in a little deeper and you get some roasted fruit, which is pleasant.
There’s a sweet and buttery undercurrent that moves this along. It’s a little sugary and sharp, but not harsh. There’s more vanilla here than I expected, especially after the barrel-aged reposado didn’t offer much.
Ultimately, it’s a bit basic. I like it, but there’s little to focus on here. It’s a perfectly fine $40 tequila that’ll cost you $100 per bottle. There’s just not much do it, but it doesn’t burn so … that’s something.
This pours a richer shade of mahogany. It smells similar to the other two Komos in that it’s not especially rich or tequila-y.
Fortunately, it breaks from the rest of the pack when it gets to your lips. There’s a fresh, crisp agave flavor that leans into sugar and spice, creating a warm impression that lingers long after it’s cleared your tongue. There’s vanilla weaved into that braid, along with a little cinnamon to give everything more depth than we’d seen before.
That gives it much more sippable replay than the other two. It’s still slightly underwhelming for a $100 bottle, but this is the most justifiable purchase of the three. It’s got dessert flavors that linger throughout each dram, giving you something to think about from the moment it hits your lips to when it clears your uvula.
This is a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Komos tequilas over a cold can of Hamm’s?
If they were cheaper, sure. But at $100-plus dollars per bottle, I’m all set.
