  We present a comprehensive study of the determination of the strong coupling
from $\tau$ decay, using the most recent release of the experimental ALEPH
data. We critically review all theoretical strategies used in previous works
and put forward various novel approaches which allow to study complementary
aspects of the problem. We investigate the advantages and disadvantages of the
different methods, trying to uncover their potential hidden weaknesses and test
the stability of the obtained results under slight variations of the assumed
inputs. We perform several determinations, using different methodologies, and
find a very consistent set of results. All determinations are in excellent
agreement, and allow us to extract a very reliable value for
$\alpha_s(m_\tau^2)$. The main uncertainty originates in the pure perturbative
error from unknown higher orders. Taking into account the systematic
differences between the results obtained with the CIPT and FOPT prescriptions,
we find $\alpha_{s}^{(n_f=3)}(m_\tau^2) = 0.328 \pm 0.013$ which implies
$\alpha_{s}^{(n_f=5)}(M_Z^{2}) = 0.1197\pm 0.0015$.
