Haresh Bhojwani

Ollantaytambo, Cusco

Two decades ago, Haresh Bhojwani came to Peru as a tourist to visit Machu Picchu, one of the seven wonders of the world. Little did he know that a rainy afternoon on a cobblestone street in Cusco would lead him to a new path—a life of making spirits.

Bhojwani is the co-founder of Distilleria Andina, a distillery located in the Incan village of Ollantaytambo, where they produce award-winning "cañazo" and Andean elixirs at 2,800 meters above sea level. For Bhojwani, it was love at first sip when he had his first shot of homemade "matacuy" with Joaquin Randall in the early 2000s. Matacuy was a recipe that Joaquin's mother, Wendy Weeks, had concocted using local herbs. A decade later, Bhojwani partnered with brothers Joaquin and Ishmael Weeks to bring the "Spirit of the Andes"—artisanal distilled rum—to the world.

It all started in a pie shop...

So…. what's your background?

In what sense, professionally? Personally?

Let's start with where you were born.

I was actually born in Pakistan. My parents moved around a lot. They are originally from India, from the area that is now Pakistan. They had emigrated as refugees long before I was born, but my mom had to go back to Pakistan, so I was actually born there. At the time, they were living in Gibraltar, and from there, we moved to the Canary Islands.

So that’s why you speak Spanish…

Yeah, I grew up in the Canaries. I arrived there on my 4th birthday. Getting off the plane is my first real memory. That’s where the narrative begins for me.

And what was that like?... stepping off and arriving in the Canary Islands?

I was really little, so it was fun. I was with my family, and it felt like an adventure. We all lived in this tiny one-bedroom apartment by the beach. It all felt like a vacation. Then I learned how stressed everybody was, immigrating with three children to a completely new place.

How long did you stay in the Canary Islands?

We stayed there until quite recently. But I went to study abroad by the time I was 13. I went to boarding school in the UK. But I went back home all the time for the holidays.

Home was living in the Canaries?

Yes, my parents had a little shop where they sold perfumes. I’d always go back for summers and work in the shop with my parents—classic Indian immigrant family.

Also classic Indian to go to boarding school in the UK.

Yeah, the British influence emphasized investing in education for children. I have two older sisters who I admire and who were great role models. After high school, I didn't want to do much, but my mom convinced me to go to college in the States. So, I went to Wisconsin, which was a huge change.

It was really good for me because I needed it. Boarding school in England was kind of traumatic. This was like nice, salt-of-the-earth American people—farmers and factory workers’ children, working-class, nice families. I made a bunch of friends and I liked it.

So what year was it when you landed in Peru?

It was 2000, but I came back to work here in 2003.

So 2000 was just as a tourist?

Yeah, I was living in Bolivia and I was excited to go to Machu Picchu. I remember looking at El Albergue through the train window and thinking, “That’s cute.”

So how did you end up working in Peru?

I got a call from an organization I had worked with in Bolivia. They said, “Look, we have these problems in Peru; would you like to come and help us figure it out?”

So tell us about your first meeting with Joaquin.

Joaquin, Maxi, and their girlfriends at the time had a little pie shop in San Blas called “Pi Shop” with the mathematical “pi” symbol. It was tiny—half the size of this kitchen. I wandered in there one day just to get some coffee. It was raining and all wet outside, so I stayed for hours reading my book. That’s how I met them, and we hit it off right away.

Maxi’s ex-girlfriend pulled out a bottle of Wendy’s homemade “Matacuy” and said, “Try this.” I did and thought, “Wow! This is amazing.” We drank until dawn. By the wee hours of the morning, I drunkenly pronounced, "This needs to be shared with the whole world!"

So the idea was born the very first time that I met those guys.

So how and when was the distillery properly born?

There were 10 years in between. I moved to New York and took a job at Columbia University. But I was coming back to Peru a couple of times a year, hanging out with Joaquin, Ishma, and Maxi. The idea was always there; we always talked about it. Sometimes we’d go for drives to buy cañazo from local distilleries.

Can you explain what exactly cañazo is?

Cañazo is actually a type of rum. Internationally, that’s how it would be considered. It’s a very Peruvian thing, made in every department of Peru and drunk in every town. It is the most commonly consumed spirit in Peru, so you can’t get more Peruvian than cañazo.

It’s a sugar cane spirit. You harvest the sugar cane, squeeze it when it’s fresh, take that juice, and then ferment it using natural yeast. Once it reaches peak fermentation, you distill it. Internationally, it’s known as “rum agricole,” as opposed to traditional rum made from fermented molasses.

Once it starts fermenting, you have to know what you’re doing. It’s knowledge passed from father to son, representing hundreds of years of tradition. It’s this magical process that I’ve always loved. It’s unconventional. Until a few years ago, weird, funky things were snubbed. Now, with the rise of natural wines, people are learning to appreciate unique flavors.

You just said sugarcane spirit. Why is the word “spirit” a synonym for liqueur? Have you ever thought about that?

It’s like the essence of the plant. Spirits, everything from whiskeys to vodkas, are all the essence of something. It’s also because they evaporate and condense during the boiling process. The fermentation process is similar to making beer or chicha. It’s messy and muddy and will rot unless you do something with it. You either have to drink it or it will turn into vinegar. Or, you can distill it. Distilling pulls the spirit out of it: the part that can’t rot—its essence.

You pull it out by boiling that beer or chicha until it starts to evaporate. You capture the vapor, condense it by cooling it down, and then collect it into a bottle. What you capture is the purest part, the part that can never go bad. You can bottle a spirit for a thousand years and it will still be good—actually, it gets better because it keeps mellowing and evolving. So it’s the immortal part of the plant.

I love that, “the immortal part of the plant…”

I never thought of that before… so thanks for pulling it out of me…

You talked about bringing out the spirit of the plant, but I thought of it as bringing out the spirit of the person who drinks it.

Yeah, that’s a great correlation too because it lightens the spirits. And the thing about spirits is—at least here in the Andes—there’s a belief in their medicinal and sacred properties. In rituals, cañazo is used to bless a house or cure a person on a spiritual level. It’s rubbed on you, blown, burned, or thrown on the ground. So it has that weight. And then there’s Matacuy, which is an Andean elixir. It’s an elixir of medicinal plants extracted in a spirit. Matacuy and other local elixirs are considered medicines. This isn’t just in the Andes; in the jungle, they have all these crazy concoctions with roots.

So, yeah, it’s this real Peruvian thing of making medicine that we’re tapping into.

So you had no background at all in the making of spirits?

No, none. Yeah… [laughs] …That made it harder.

The tagline of Destileria Andina’s webpage is "awakening the spirits of the Sacred Valley." You just discussed its cultural value… what about the economic significance?

The economic piece is very interesting too. If you think about Peru some 50 years ago, there were no roads connecting most of the country. Each valley was like its own country, ruled by an hacendado and the local church.

Some parts were so isolated that money wouldn’t circulate, so goods were often bartered. Salt was used for transactions, as was cañazo. Some haciendas even printed their own coins with the value measured in arrobas of cañazo. If you got paid in those coins, it was the gold standard.

The local gold standard…

Yeah, the cañazo standard. So you have medicinal, spiritual, and economic uses for this thing that is still consumed throughout Peru. It’s being replaced to some extent by more industrial products. We are in a moment where we can revalue this thing that is very valuable.

That seems to be the tendency post-pandemic… to go back to the basics and hold a greater appreciation for nature.

In a way, it’s been happening since before that. Well, you know what happens: something is great, then it gets destroyed by a generation that doesn’t appreciate it. Then the next generation builds it back. It’s happening in Mexico with mezcal, and with all these funky, natural wines.

And even with food. People have realized it’s been so contaminated and processed—most of it is not even actual food.

One thing I realized with distilling is the standard of what is considered good versus what we’ve been told by the big companies. For example, consistency. The industry tells you that every bottle should taste identical—that’s “quality.” But that’s actually just a sign of massive production.

Wine has its vintage every year, no?

Wine has managed somewhat. But even before the natural wine movement, there were narrow standards. All the little wineries in the little valleys that have unique tastes are just wonderful. The small wineries don’t care about getting into the big international market or appealing to standardized notions of how wine should be. So they’re just great.

And with many natural wines, you don’t get a hangover.

Yeah, yeah. You don’t. My girlfriend and I were amazed we didn’t have a single hangover on a trip in the Canaries—we drank wine from small vineyards every single day. Matacuy doesn’t give hangovers either. I promise that!

So tell me about the awards you guys have won.

We were making something that was not widely known. When you send your spirit to international award competitions, they don’t know the story or narrative behind what they’re drinking. Much of the artisanal producer's charm lies in the narrative. “We are making this cañazo with sugar cane in a remote Andean village…” So, we wondered how we would present this. The first competition we entered was the Spirits Business Award in London. We were naive—it’s one of the most industrial and biggest awards in the world. We sent our little bottle of Caña Alta and ended up winning a silver medal! They only awarded two medals in our category that year—one to us and the other to a cachaza that had aged for seven years, five years older than our distillery. We thought, “Wow! We’ve got something here…”

This was our first competition. The judges were industry people who were solely judging the taste.

We were super excited. Then we got a silver medal for our Reposado in San Francisco, which is also a huge competition. In Berlin, we got bronze and two silvers. In Chile, we got a grand gold.

After accumulating several awards, we decided to slow down. Instead of accumulating gold stickers on the same bottle, we decided to wait and come up with a new concept. We are actually relaunching—did you know this?

No.

“Caña Alta” is actually going to disappear and be rebranded as Salqa. Salqa is amazing.

You mean the product Caña Alta is going away? Or is it just changing its name?

It’s changing its name and has evolved in terms of flavor. We have various products that we are unifying under Salqa. Everything we make with sugar cane—aside from Matacuy, which is its own thing—will be Salqa with different variations. The Salqa you are thinking about is what we call “Salqa Botanizado,” a project we did with Francesca Ferreyros, an amazing young chef who’s worked in Asia. Her restaurant is Baan, and she’s worked at Gaggan in Thailand.

Then there’s Salqa Cosecha, which we did with Jorge Muñoz. Funny enough, they are getting married. We didn’t intend to set them up, but when I saw him last week, I asked, “Did we have anything to do with this?” [laughs]

We also have Kollje with Pia Leon. These collaborations fall under the name Salqa because everything we do with sugar cane is a collaboration—with the growers and the consumers. Our brand is very fluid and interactive. Salqa is a Quechua word meaning “wild” in the sense of something that has returned to its natural state, closer to its roots. So a wolf is a “salqa” dog, and a sheep that gets lost in the mountains and becomes wild again is salqa. Our spirit is also this return to ancestral roots. The bottle is now made in Peru, handmade from recycled glass. We’re making handmade labels from waste material from sugarcane. The bottle is beautifully designed by Ishmael.

So it’s super exciting for us.

Yeah, I love it. That makes more sense to have one umbrella brand name.

We also wanted it to feel very Andean. Caña Alta could be from anywhere, and the label could be from Finland or Sweden. It didn’t have an Andean identity per se.

I love that your webpage says: “We are committed to reforesting the valley by distilling its essence. Every toast is an offering.” Beautiful to think about every toast as an offering… Literally. So every bottle you guys produce?

Every bottle, other than the 50 ml. Yeah, absolutely, that’s the commitment. We do it this way because we want it to be part of our costs. If something really matters to you, it has to be in your core. So why not just add this cost and include it in the price? Let’s not skimp on our commitment to this place and to the future.

You’re incorporating the environmental costs.

Yeah, exactly. All three of us believe we have to give back to this community.

What do you love most about running a distillery?

The interaction with people. It’s a great excuse to meet and collaborate with amazing individuals. Working with Francesca and Jorge, interacting with bottle makers—who gets to do that?

This is the new look [shows new label]. It features the three animals of the Andes, representing the three worlds: the heavenly, earthly, and under-earthly. The mountains our water comes from, the Salcantay—and the word “Salqa” is in there—along with the sugarcanes growing in the mountains.

Wow, amazing! Love it!

What’s it like to live in Ollantaytambo, and how often are you here?

I’m here about half the year, for a couple of months at a time.

Where are you when you’re not here?

In Wisconsin. Both my sisters and my father are there.

And what’s it like living here in Ollantaytambo?

It’s great. I like it more and more. It’s so beautiful here, though I sometimes miss restaurants and such.

What are your favorite spots in Cusco?

I don’t have a car, so…

You’re not a regular anywhere?

I don’t want to sound so team-ish, but El Albergue is still my number one choice to eat. Chuncho is number two. Alqa is great too. Honestly, for years, I mostly went to the market and got a daily menu. It’s exciting because every day is different and made with so much artistry. The people who eat there expect the best, so you get these amazing meals.

And it can’t be any fresher.

Exactly! It can’t be any fresher.

Last question—what are you optimistic about?

We are building a new distillery. It’s going to be amazing. It’s on the river, with 100 meters of riverfront, near the brewery towards Urubamba. It will be a center for collaboration as well as distillation, allowing us to do more. I’m really excited about that. I’m also nervous because I’m comfortable in my little shack in the field that no one can find. Moving to a new road and a new building will be a big change, but it’s exciting.

Awesome, congratulations!

It’s exciting. It is a real privilege to be able to do this.