Mission Taco Joint is launching a private label tequila with St. Louis–based brand Una Vida Tequila. The Mission Taco Joint Una Vida Blanco Tequila was designed specifically for use in the restaurant’s top-selling Mission Margarita and will be behind the bar at all six Mission Taco Joint restaurants in St. Louis and Kansas City.
Kyle Harlan, the restaurant’s beverage director, told St. Louis Magazine the tequila will be the anchor for the Mission Margarita, which accounts for around 70 percent of all drinks sold at Mission Taco restaurants. The tequila will also be used for late-night happy hour tequila shots and select craft cocktails.
Find the best food in St. Louis
Subscribe to the St. Louis Dining In and Dining Out newsletters to stay up-to-date on the local restaurant and culinary scene.
“Working with our distillery, we were able to get 20 different Blanco samples up here for Kyle to try,” says Zach Conley, co-founder of Una Vida Tequila. “It wasn’t what Bryce [Lob, Una Vida co-founder] and I thought was best, it was what worked best in Mission Taco’s margarita so that the flavor profile wouldn’t change.”
For Harlan, the collaboration had to stay true to the Mission Margarita recipe, which has remained unchanged for seven years. “The tequila is very agave forward, and when we say that, it’s kind of a vegetal pepper, almost like a poblano pepper quality that you can taste with this kind of citric element that goes on with it,” Harlan says. The flavor profile is rounded out by honey and other floral notes, bright citrus, and a little vanilla.
Harlan says he’s pleased with the way the new tequila complements the other elements of the Mission Margarita. “Those things all blend seamlessly into our margarita, which is fresh lime juice, agave nectar, and Pierre Ferrand Dry Orange Curaçao,” Harlan says. “That Curaçao also has pretty heavy vanilla notes. It’s almost like an orange dreamsicle. It just highlights the tequila and lime juice, which go great together and just make it a little bit different.”
The idea for the tequila was also driven partly by rising costs in the industry. “A big part of it was trying to maintain a price point that we wanted our customers to be able to enjoy,” Harlan says. The tequila market has exploded in recent years, and while that means more people drinking margaritas, tequila prices have also increased. “We were just looking for ways to continue moving at the price point that we were at. We don’t want to set the bar at a point where people can’t afford to enjoy coming into Mission and having a margarita with some tacos,” Harlan says.
For now, the Mission Taco Joint Una Vida Blanco Tequila will only be available at Mission Taco locations for consumption on the premises. Harlan says there’s a possibility that the restaurant will sell bottles to take home further down the line, but that’s not on the table at present.
Bryce Lob and Zach Conley’s company, One Life Spirits, launched Una Vida Tequila in 2018. The pair had spent several years working in the tequila industry for a Denver-based brand before deciding to go it alone. Relocating to Tequila, Mexico, for several months to research the production process, Lob and Conley met with a number of distillers. Eventually, they settled on a distiller to partner with and put the first batch of Una Vida into production.
Una Vida’s three varieties—Blanco, Reposado and Anejo—are stocked by a number of bars and restaurants around St. Louis as well as liquor stores and other retailers (see their website for information on where to find them). After building its presence in Missouri and Kansas over the past year, Una Vida has just launched in Texas, the second-largest tequila market by state in the U.S. after California.
Mission Taco Joint is currently building out a new venue in the former Kirkwood Station Brewing Company. The 12,000 square-foot restaurant, Mission Taco’s biggest to date, will feature a visible tortilla production line and amusement arcade with retro games. Harlan says the venue is on course to open in early spring: “Things are moving according to plan and we are looking like we are on our targets internally.”
