Donta Henson had no previous experience running a business in the vast and competitive alcohol industry, but that didn’t stop him and his brother from jumping in feet first when they decided they wanted to launch their own brand of tequila.
“This is something that we just wanted to do really as a passion project,” Henson said. “We hit the ground running from the start.”
Their creation became “Los Hermanos 1978 Tequila,” which is now sold in Maryland, D.C., Delaware, New York, New Jersey and Georgia.
Both Henson and his brother William live in Maryland — in Glen Burnie and Baltimore respectively — but they started their adventure far away from home in late 2020 when they took a trip to Mexico to get a feel for how the industry operates.
“We reached out to a few different distilleries, and we were telling them that we wanted to start a brand and didn’t have any experience,” Henson explained.
The brothers narrowed their choices down to one particular distillery that helps small brands get off the ground, and they went to meet their new colleagues during a four-day trip to Jalisco.
“We thought we were going to just sample some tequila until we picked the ones we wanted, but they really gave us a crash course in tequila,” Henson said.
Their experience included time in a field with farmers harvesting blue agave, the plant that is the base ingredient of tequila.
They toured the distillery plant and sat down to sample a wide selection, choosing a flavor profile that they wanted.
When the brothers received their first shipment of their tequila in August of 2021, there was only one store in Baltimore that agreed to sell it.
Now, only three years later, they have more than 300 points of distribution.
“It’s more work than I ever anticipated,” Henson said, noting how competitive the industry is. “There’s a lot of ‘uphill’ that you have to conquer, but at the end of the day, it’s some of the most rewarding things that I have ever taken on.”
Henson said he and his brother want to focus on expanding specifically in the D.C. region, and they want their tequila to be sold in Virginia stores by next year.
“There’s just umpteenth tequila brands, so you can’t lose track of what you’re doing to focus on all the other things that are happening in the market,” Henson said. “We really want to be a well-known brand in the DMV.”
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