G4 Tequila, distilled at El Pandillo under NOM 1579 in Jesús María, Jalisco, was the subject of a 2026 VinePair profile framing it as a bartender favorite made by master distiller Felipe Camarena's family.
The piece adds to a long run of VinePair's own bartender surveys in which working bartenders have named G4 their preferred pour, going back to at least 2022 and recurring in polls on underrated bottles, best value tequila and go-to sippers through 2026.
Who Distills G4 and Where
G4 is made by Felipe Camarena at El Pandillo, the family's own distillery in Jesús María, Jalisco, registered under NOM 1579. Camarena spent most of his career at La Alteña, his family's original plant in Arandas, before starting construction on his own distillery in 2007 on family land in a neighboring town, finishing the build in 2011. He named the new distillery after his grandfather's favorite bull.
How the Camarena Family Ties G4 to Tapatío, El Tesoro and Ocho
La Alteña, founded by Don Felipe Camarena in Arandas under NOM 1139, produces Tapatío and El Tesoro today. Don Felipe's grandson Carlos Camarena, a third-generation master distiller and fifth-generation agave farmer, ran that distillery and in 2008 co-founded Tequila Ocho with the late tequila ambassador Tomas Estes, a brand built on vintage-dating bottles by harvest year and naming the specific rancho the agave came from. Ocho was made at La Alteña before opening its own distillery in 2021. Carlos's brother, Felipe Camarena, left the shared family plant to found G4 at El Pandillo. Company materials describe the G4 name as a reference to four generations of Camarena tequila makers, with Felipe's sons, Luis Felipe and Alan, representing the next generation at the distillery.
What Goes Into a Bottle of G4
G4 is distilled using a roughly even blend of captured rainwater and mountain spring water drawn from the ranch at El Pandillo, a detail the brand and its distributors point to as distinctive in tequila production. Agave is cooked in stone ovens rather than industrial autoclaves, then crushed with a mechanical, tahona-style roller the distillery has nicknamed for its improvised, workshop-built construction. Fermentation takes place in a mix of stainless steel and pine tanks using a yeast strain the family attributes to Felipe's grandfather, followed by distillation in copper stills. The core lineup runs Blanco, Reposado, Añejo and Extra Añejo, alongside limited releases such as a higher-proof Blanco and a wood-fermented Madera series. Company and retailer materials describe the tequila as made without added flavoring, coloring or sweetening agents, a claim that has not been independently verified through any published third-party analysis.
Why Bartenders Keep Naming G4
In VinePair's 2022 underrated-tequila roundup, one bartender grouped G4 with Fortaleza and Tequila Ocho as a traditionally made bottle already well known to the trade. By 2024, a wine director in Tampa cited G4 in a poll on the best bang-for-buck tequila, and in 2025 a Nashville bartender placed it in the forty-to-fifty-dollar range in a survey on the best tequila under fifty dollars, pointing to the rain-and-spring-water blend and brick-oven cooking as reasons for its texture. In VinePair's most recent go-to tequila poll, a Chicago restaurant general manager said G4 Blanco has been his standing choice for more than a decade, citing its price-to-quality ratio in both stirred cocktails and neat pours.
What This Means
In Tequila Watch's own blind-tasting database, G4 Blanco carries a score of 95 and G4 Reposado a 94, both marked Verified Pure, placing them among the highest-rated highland tequilas the panel has assessed. Several of El Pandillo's limited single-lot bottlings, including the Madera series and various proof variants, have not yet come up for tasting, which reflects scheduling rather than any finding about those bottlings.