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This is a spiced coffee liqueur rooted in place. Admixtures of herbs, chiles, flowers, and spices perform specific functions to the blend as emulsifiers and flavor agents. Like a symphony, each plays a role in this distinctive Oaxacan-spiced coffee liqueur.

I’m not a botanist, I don’t even have a garden, and my potted plants at home oscillate between being parched and waterlogged. Everything I have learned is from working directly with distillers and farmers throughout Latin America since 2015, when I relocated to Perú. I am a distiller and have a master’s degree in food studies. I am fascinated by the way we interact with plants and how, over millennia, we have developed innovations that allow them to feed us, heal us, and even

It was not until I arrived, got my bearings, and took a long, thought filled walk to the gorgeous Gocta waterfall, a four to five hour round trip spent traipsing past trapiches for the production of sugarcane based panela, guarapo, and cañazo, that the mission presented itself to me, to distill hyper local ingredients using a distiller built from local pottery.

Understanding how to process the yacon with the materials we had on hand, opening up a dialogue between us, the agricultural products, and their potential to become viable spirits, while establishing initial production methods for their transformation.

Yacon is an ancient tuber endemic to the Andes. Could it be a dream ingredient for distillation? Come along on my adventures with yacon.

THE pitahaya (dragon fruit in English) from Churuja, Bongará, Amazonas. Churuja is only about 20 minutes' driving from Gocta Lab , though you find the climbing cactus growing wild all over the area, like a weed. Endemic to this region, this pitahaya has recently become a crop in high demand in Lima and in export markets. The region is seeking to expand plantations to meet the rapidly growing demand. The pitahaya churuja has a yellow outer shell. The inside is a very sweet, fl

Rakacha is a Quechua word, while in Spanish the plant is known as arracacha, zanahoria blanca, or apio criollo. Peeling rakacha at Gocta Lab Rakacha is an ancestral Andean tuber; its domestication predates that of the potato and corn. It is likely the oldest cultivar in South America.  Its growing cycle is 10-12 months and must be harvested before flowering. It grows between 1,500 and 3,000 meters above sea level. The highest genetic diversity has been found around Cajamarca,

This is extracted from a school project from the fall of 2020 that I felt compelled to share four years later: I was opening a restaurant...

Vitis vinifera is the single species that forms the basis for nearly all of the wine the world consumes, there are between 5,000 and...

Comparing and contrasting two spirit categories helps add dimension to our understanding of them. For most of the last 10 years, I have...

Working in Mexico since 2016 with Experience Agave, the first brand dedicated to promoting the tradition of agave spirits through...

Rarely do we consider the spirits that we drink as the (agri)cultural products that they are, their impact on producing communities, and...

José Luis Carrera is the producer of Paranubes, a rum distilled from the juice of fresh-pressed sugarcane and located deep in Southern Mexico. In a compact river valley in Oaxaca’s Sierra Mazateca surrounded by hillsides covered in spunky green cane plantations, Jose Luis’s distillery is paradisiacal. A trapiche (sugarcane mill) stands sentinel under a large fringed palapa, while two wooden vats, used for fermentation, and two copper stills are set on a decline and in descen

Apu Winery is perched on a rugged Andean mountainside and it's vines cascading toward the agricultural valley that sits below. Their...