Diffuser
An industrial machine that strips sugar from raw, shredded agave with hot water and pressure — no slow cooking. Very efficient, and widely blamed for flat, characterless tequila.
A difusor — diffuser — is industrial equipment borrowed from sugar refining. Instead of cooking whole agave piñas for a day or more and then crushing them, the distillery shreds the raw agave and runs it through a long chamber where hot water and pressure (and sometimes acid) wash the sugars out.
It's extremely efficient: it pulls more sugar from each plant, takes hours instead of days, and needs far less labor. The trade-off is flavor. The slow cooking that builds caramelized, roasted-agave character barely happens, and the resulting spirit is often described as thin, flat or faintly medicinal.
That's why diffusers are so closely tied to the additive debate: a little glycerin, sweetener and oak extract can cover for what the process didn't build. Tequila made with a diffuser is legal and doesn't have to say so on the label. Some of the best-known celebrity and mass-market brands are made this way; very few additive-free tequilas are.
Keep reading
How tequila is made
From mature blue Weber agave to bottle in seven steps — harvest, cook, crush, ferment, distill, age, bottle. The choices a producer makes at each step are most of what you taste.
Read TermWhat does "additive-free" mean?
Tequila labeled "100% agave" can legally contain up to 1% additives — glycerin, sweeteners, caramel color, oak extract — without saying so. Additive-free tequila contains none of them.
Read TermTahona
A huge volcanic-stone wheel, weighing a ton or more, that slowly crushes cooked agave in a circular pit. The original way to make tequila, and still used by a handful of traditional distilleries.
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