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Home-Grown Spirit San Diego-born tequila brand champions small producers with big passion BY DEANNA MURPHY wonder to themselves whether the same thing she does for sparkling wines existed for small family growers distilling tequila in Mexico. "So, we hopped on a flight and we spent a bunch of time down in Jalisco, meeting families, getting to know people, asking for recommendations, kissing a lot of frogs, but finding some of these incredible farmers that were making arguably the best tequila in the world that no one had ever heard of," says Caffrey. Riffing on his wife's business plan, Caffrey concedes, he and Maddux secured an import and distribution license and launched a quarterly tequila club called (naturally) We Drink Tequila. "What we do is we find a farmer, a family, who is making incredible tequila that isn't already represented in the United States," says Caffrey. "Usually they're so small batch, sometimes even 1,000 or 5,000 bottles." W e wanted to express what we believed was the best tequila in the world," says Preston Caffrey, CEO and co-founder of Bebemos. Lofty goals, to be sure, for a brand created by partners whose experience until recently was not in distilling but merely drinking the spirit, but that hardly meant a lack of savvy. Caffrey's wife was already operating a successful curated sparkling wine subscription called We Drink Bubbles when the pandemic hit — a boon for many businesses that offered at-home delivery, with alcohol being no exception. e bubbles Caffrey's wife shares are estate-grown champagnes and sparkling wines whose production is too small to be distributed to the masses, and as he and his best friend Jon Maddux sipped more and more tequila, they began to Indulge dining PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF BEBEMOS ranchandcoast.com 70 SEPTEMBER 2025 RANCH & COAST MAGAZINE Bebemos co-founders Preston Caffrey, Jon Maddux, and Patrick Tracy