Bill Sisoian, left, and Charlie Garza of El Perrito Tequila are pictured during lunch last month at La Fogata. Garza owns the San Antonio-based tequila brand. Sisoian is assisting in expanding its distribution network.
Sam Owens/San Antonio Express-News
When Charlie Garza and Bill Sisoian were in college in the 1980s, parties were fueled by kegs and cheap six-packs of beer.
Those days are long gone.
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The new generation has a taste for tequila — ordering shots for a quick fix, sipping it neat or drinking it mixed in margaritas.
“I have a 32-year-old daughter and a 30-year-old daughter,” Garza said. “When they were at Texas Tech, we’d go to the games and instead of beer, it was dominated by tequila. When I was there, we were all about the keg parties.”
Those shifting tastes also prompted a shift for Garza and Sisoian, who have a collective 60 years in the beer industry.
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After crossing paths as they touted competing brands from Anheuser-Busch and Miller Brewing, they now work side-by-side, using their Rolodexes of industry contacts to sell Garza’s homegrown El Perrito Tequila to Texas restaurants and liquor stores.
They’ve found a niche marketing the San Antonio brand as an affordable house tequila for Mexican restaurants in the region.
“Every time we win a new account, we always text each other, ‘Hey, another win for the old guys,’ ” Garza said.
Tequila ‘gold rush’
Garza, now 64, started on a Budweiser delivery truck in high school and worked his way up to director of Modelo Brands for South Texas. He retired from the industry in 2008 but wasn’t ready for a quiet lifestyle. He started his own sales and marketing company, picking up a handful of tequila brands as clients. As he learned more about the Mexican spirit, he observed how it was transforming the landscape of the alcohol industry.
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“The tequila category became more and more prominent,” Garza said. “Millennials started drinking it and spending money on some really high-end brands. Celebrities started getting in the mix with their own brands.”
As overall U.S. alcohol sales have softened in recent years, tequila emerged as the spirits industry’s standout performer, notching growth as other beverages are seeing sales decline. The industry has dubbed the boom a gold rush.
From 2003 to 2024, tequila and mezcal volumes have grown 302% at an average of 6.8% per year, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. In 2024 alone, 32.2 million 9-liter cases were sold.
Tequila now holds the largest revenue share of the U.S. wine and spirits market, surpassing vodka for the first time in the first quarter of 2025, according to Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America. Much of its growth can be attributed to the influx of brands and distillers offering products ranging from affordable to top-shelf.
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It’s been boosted by celebrities jumping on the lucrative tequila bandwagon, using their fame to market and invest in trendy brands such as Kendall Jenner’s 818, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Teremana, Mark Wahlberg’s Flecha Azul, Michael Jordan’s Cincoro, Kevin Hart’s Gran Coramino and Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul’s Dos Hombres Mezcal.
In 2017, actor George Clooney, along with businessmen Rande Gerber and Mike Meldman, sold their popular Casamigos brand for a reported $1 billion to Diageo, the alcoholic beverage company behind brands like Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Smirnoff and Don Julio.
Many celebrity-backed tequilas are marketed as 100% agave brands, meaning they are made solely from the sugars of the Blue Weber agave plant for a purer and more complex flavor profile.
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“I wanted to get in on the tequila business at the right time, but with this whole celebrity craze you have to have a lot of money to fit into the 100% agave category,” Garza said. “I didn’t want to spend all my Anheuser-Busch distributor retirement money.”
That’s when Garza decided to forge his own path in the booming industry without the need for a flashy name or hefty investment.
Charlie Garza is pictured with an employee of D’Reyes Tequila, which distills his El Perrito Tequila in Tequila, Mexico.
El Perrito
Building the brand
He said he realized the best route would be to target the house or well tequila category, which is typically made with 51% agave. After asking around, he discovered that most restaurants had no real loyalty to a specific house brand.
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“I started just waking up every morning and hitting the streets and just asking some of the key players in town, ‘Hey, what’s your house tequila?’ ” Garza recalled. “There were always different names. It was just loyalty to the cheapest price.”
In 2012, Ronnie Gabriel started a house tequila brand called El Perrito. The Gabriel family owned the Don’s & Ben’s and Gabriel’s Liquor store chains in town for 70 years before the company went bankrupt in 2019.
As a dog lover, Garza was fond of the name and it already had some visibility within San Antonio. He worked out a deal to buy the brand and trademark from Gabriel in late 2019.
His next step was to find a distiller in Mexico. Only spirits produced in specific Mexican regions can be sold as tequila. Products made outside of those designated areas must be labeled as “agave spirit” or mezcal. Garza signed an agreement with Tequila D’Reyes, a small third-generation distillery in the town of Tequila, Mexico.
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“In Tequila, there are these humble families that are distilling a spirit that only comes from that part of the world,” Garza said. “The farmers’ hands are sunburned and their faces look like leather because they own these thousand-acre farms of agave.”
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The distiller submitted his brand to the Tequila Regulatory Council, the industry’s regulatory authority. After about six months, El Perrito was approved in early 2021. From there, he designed the bottle to stand out among other inexpensive brands. He created a story behind the name, about a dog that helps an old agave farmer sniff out the ripest blue agave plants.
Garza got his first 500 cases in November 2021 and found a distributor, Navarro Brothers Trading and Imports, to distribute the brand across Texas. He also purchased a warehouse near downtown San Antonio to build his inventory.
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“It came in and I just started hitting the streets with a couple of samples, knocking on my friend’s doors,” Garza said. “Even though they’re my friends from the industry and they get you in the door, the taste has to be there. I would carry competition with me, even by the looks of the bottles, the perception is that ours is going to be better, and it is.”
Dream team
After building El Perrito’s foundation, Garza needed someone to help him grow the business. He’d known Sisoian for 40 years through the beer industry and, after bumping into each other one night, Sisoian let his old friend know he was getting ready to retire as president of local craft brewer Freetail Brewing Co.
“The craft industry started going downhill, and I was ready to spend more time with my wife, kids and grandkids at 67 years old,” Sisoian recalled. “Charlie told me to call him when I got bored, but I had been working my whole life and my wife and I had plans for all these trips, so I initially turned him down.”
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READ MORE: Freetail Brewing, a San Antonio brewpub icon, shuts one of its two taprooms
A few months went by, and Sisoian picked up the phone.
“My wife and I have a great relationship after 47 years but after being together 24 hours a day, I thought I was going to screw up a perfectly good marriage,” Sisoian recalled of telling her he was considering going back to work. “I couldn’t even get the words out of my mouth before she went, ‘Please go. I love you, but you’re driving me crazy.’ ”
As much as he loved quiet moments at the house, he realized that he loved the chase of a sale and was ready to get back out there again.
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“I called Charlie and said, ‘Whatever you say, just don’t say I told you so.’ But he was 100% right,” Sisoian said. “I was bored to tears.”
They met the next day and Garza gave Sisoian a quick education on the tequila business. Sisoian laid down some rules before he shook Garza’s hand.
“I told him I don’t have to wear long pants,” Sisoian said. “I don’t want to go to an office. I don’t want the employees. I don’t need health insurance. I don’t need benefits. But I know a lot of folks and I like to be out with people, like I was last night, a little too late. I just want to go out and sell.”
After sampling El Perrito, Sisoian was sold and a deal was made.
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“When you think of a well tequila, you assume it’s pretty harsh,” he said. “But I joke that this one doesn’t give you that scrunched up tequila face. This one is smooth without the harsh burn, and Charlie has perfected the recipe.”
Using the industry relationships he made over the years, Sisoian has already helped grow the brand throughout San Antonio, New Braunfels and the surrounding areas.
“I walk around with my dorky cooler on wheels with a few bottles, and I sample with the owners and key decision makers,” he said.
He’s brought on clients, including Santikos Entertainment Co., which owns 12 movie theaters throughout Texas and uses El Perrito for its batch margaritas. Garza said they sell from 30 to 50 cases of the brand a week.
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“Sometimes I think I’m addicted to when I get the sale but actually, I think I’m really addicted to like all the times people say no, and then when you finally get it, that’s what makes it exciting,” Sisoian said. “That’s an incredible feeling.”
Charlie Garza, owner of El Perrito Tequila, with bottles of the brand’s silver and gold tequila at La Fogata.
Sam Owens/San Antonio Express-News
A better retirement
El Perrito now is sold in more than 300 restaurants, independent liquor stores and businesses in San Antonio, New Braunfels, Austin, Houston and Dallas. The brand offers silver and gold tequilas.
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San Antonio restaurants, including La Fogata, Hops & Hounds, Slackers Sports Bar, and Southerleigh Fine Food & Brewery and Brasserie Mon Chou Chou at Pearl, all have Garza’s tequila behind the bar. The distributor sells the bottles for $8.75 to $9 a liter, which is a couple of dollars more than a usual well tequila, but because of the premium taste and locality of the brand, Garza has been able to build the loyalty he saw was missing within the house tequila category.
“We’re the only local house well tequila owners in Texas, and it starts with the relationships,” he said. “If the taste has enough equity, they keep it, and the relationships continue.”
Six Flags Fiesta Texas also uses El Perrito Silver in its margaritas. Customers can buy their own bottle at independent liquor stores, like Alamo City Liquors, for $11 to $12.
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Garza said the company now sells from 10,000 to 12,000 bottles of El Perrito a month. He drives around in a Jeep with the brand’s logo plastered all over it.
They market by word of mouth, mostly visiting old friends they met through decades of selling beer across Texas.
“When I go into something, I don’t go halfway. I’m going to be selling El Perrito to every person I meet, anywhere I’m at,” Sisoian said. “I’m pumping it into people. If you build a relationship that will last forever, you’ll be able to sell it to them. I’m applying those same principles that I pushed forever when I was with the Miller Beer distribution here in town to now help build this brand that I feel so strongly about.”
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Garza said the business is generating good cash flow but most of the profit is being reinvested into the brand. Their goal is to build El Perrito big enough that larger companies start to take notice, so they can become “the next Lalo or Buzzball,” both of which were homegrown brands in Texas that were acquired for millions of dollars.
“More importantly, we just want to have fun at our age,” Garza said.