There's an old saying about trusting the process: Leap, and the net will appear. In the case of Maui entrepreneur Paul Turner, that net turned out to be covered in spikes and filled with sweet juice.
Founder of Waikulu Distillery outside Makawao-a "farm to bottle distillery," he says-Turner bought former pineapple land and experimented with several different crops to see what might grow. "I tried citrus, I tried pomegranate, but they just suffered," says Turner. "To grow anything here is a bit of a heartache. But then I planted a few agave as a novelty, and then they just took off."
Albert Lopez (SEEN ABOVE) cuts agave leaves from the pina, or heart, at Waikulu Distillery near Makawao, Maui. The "farm to bottle" operation is among the very few distilleries that produce spirits entirely in the Islands. After harvesting, the pinas are cooked for forty-two hours so the juice can be extracted.
Indeed, the heavy, six-foot-tall agave plant can endure Maui's blustery trade winds, and the spiny leaves ensure that an invasive pest-axis deer-doesn't want anything to do with them. They're drought tolerant (they're in the same family as Joshua trees) and thrive in a more consistent annual temperature range than Mexican-grown agave, which helps create juice that's richer in sugar. What started nine years ago with a couple of plants has grown to an orchard numbering more than three thousand, with agave spirits now available for purchase, and tours and tastings starting soon.
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Above (LEFT), Neiman Moses mans the crusher (RIGHT), which extracts sugars from the pinas to be fermented and aged into agave spirits.
Turner is more than just a farmer, though: He's a self-taught distiller and serial tinkerer who engineered much of the gear used to craft the spirits on-site. He captured his own wild yeast to use in the fermentation process. He modified a log splitter to cut up the agave hearts, or pinas, which can weigh up to five hundred pounds. The pinas are cooked in an oven for forty-two hours before taking a ride on a Tahona wheel that Turner helped create. It crushes the pina and squeezes out juice, which, after fermenting just feet from the farm, is bottled or barreled. One of the agave spirits, Opio, gains its cinnamon and vanilla flavors from being aged for three months in North American oak barrels. Others are infused with smoked chili peppers or aged in bourbon barrels.
Despite the buzz around the agave spirits, Turner says he's committed to keeping things small. He doesn't plan to scale up, but possibly he'll branch out, he says. "Maybe we'll move into mezcal-like spirits someday, but for now it's all here. This is it."
