Raw material quality at distillery intake is a critical control point in tequila production, yet the operational recording and use of agave defects during reception have been only partially systematized in the literature. This study described the physical, biological, chemical, and normative defects recorded during reception of Agave tequilana Weber at a tequila distillery and organized them as operational criteria for quality control and rejection decision-making. A descriptive observational study was conducted at a distillery in the Tequila Valley, Jalisco, Mexico, during 2023. Routine receiving records were analyzed using truck trips as the primary unit of analysis. A total of 1,161 truck trips were registered. Truckloads were inspected using an acceptance sampling procedure based on MIL-STD-105E under General Inspection Level II (code letter J; 80 piñas per truckload). Defects were classified into physical, biological, chemical, and normative categories, and data were summarized using absolute frequencies and percentages. Of the 1,161 truck trips, 267 were rejected, corresponding to an overall rejection rate of 23.0%. Among rejected trips, the highest descriptive frequency corresponded to third-party agave (138/267; 51.7%), followed by Nayarit (47/267; 17.6%), Sur (27/267; 10.1%), and Cd. Tequila (22/267; 8.2%). The most frequent recorded rejection criterion was health status (139/267; 52.1%), followed by record of cultivation location (66/267; 24.7%) and total sugars (%TS) (42/267; 15.7%). These findings indicate that rejection was mainly associated with biological condition, traceability, and physicochemical suitability. The proposed framework may support more standardized intake evaluation, although the findings should be interpreted as a descriptive operational characterization limited to one distillery and one calendar year.
Zepeda et al. (Fri,) studied this question.