Equity Share - Mẩy

Sông Cái Distillery believes farmers are central to what we do and we are always trying to find ways to innovate on and meaningfully have a positive impact on the livelihoods of the farmers we partner with. 

Mẩy Amaro Bitters is one our latest products that highlights the evolution of working partnerships between Sông Cái Distillery and farming communities. 

Lý Lở Mẩy (cô Chạn) and Daniel met nearly 8 years ago working on forest and native seed conservation. Naturally, when Sông Cái Distillery started 5 years ago, we started working with her to source botanicals for our gins. As our working relationship progressed, in 2020 Sông Cái Distillery invested in building a small processing facility for the community farmers cooperative in her village in Lào Cai province. The goal was for farmers to be able to move up in the supply chain and more value-added products as opposed to selling purely crude agricultural products. This shared facility now fully employs two community members dedicated to processing agricultural products year round.

Mẩy Amaro Bitters is a project that builds upon this timeline. Lý Lở Mẩy has long since been a practitioner of traditional Red Dao medicinal botany and has been making medicinal tinctures and bitters since she was young and has been continuing the longstanding tradition since. When we approached her to make an amaro bitters with us, she was enthusiastic. After rounds of experimentation and refinement, the recipe that was originally decided upon was not what we went to market with.

Of the botanicals in the original recipe, we could only sustainably source 13 botanicals without harming the integrity of the local forests. Lý Mẩy Chạn and us decided that proceeds from Mẩy Amaro Bitters would help fund native seed preservation and propagation efforts that included native seed nurseries and protection and cultivation of new forests. We currently have two full time community members working on this effort. Our hope is in the future we can add more botanicals into the commercial recipe as their seed stock in the forests reaches more sustainable levels.

In May of 2023, we were finally able to launch Mẩy Amaro Bitters and more importantly, USA governing bodies officially recognized the co-ownership of the intellectual property for this product between Sông Cái Distillery and Lý Lở Mẩy. 

It’s a product that we are proud of because it represents years of hard work in building relationships with our farmers and we think cô Chạn’s enthusiasm says it all. 

So the next time you come across Mẩy, in the style of the Red Dao, we wish you “tầm dòi hến” and cheers!