Who is Sông Cái Distillery and how did we start

What is Sông Cái Distillery ?

We are Sông Cái Distillery, a distillery, winery, and fermentation lab located in Vietnam. And as of this post, we commercially make gin, amaro (địa tíu/rượu thuốc), rice wine (rượu cái), tonic(s), soda, đậu xị (Vietnamese miso), tương (Vietnamese shoyu), vinegar, and more.

Our foundation is agriculture. 

Our founder, prior to Sông Cái Distillery, had been working in agriculture for over 10 years and the transition to making alcohol professionally happened 5 years ago to add value to agricultural products and to use this brand platform to tell a story of Vietnam - the place, people, cultures, and highlighting its heirloom and native ingredients. 

You can experience this in Sông Cái Distillery’s approach to making spirits and wine. From our selection of fruits, herbs, grains, to how ferment, distill, mature, and age our growing ecosystem of products. 

We’re anxious and excited to share more with you and invite you to follow our quirky and inconsistent social media communiques in the coming months.

How did we start?

Our story starts with land and agriculture. It is a way that we viscerally stay rooted to ancestors, history, and tradition and how we stay engaged in current culture and counter-culture. 

Sông Cái Distillery started as relationships with farmers on the fringe. Whether in New Orleans East or the Northwest highlands of Vietnam. A hustle to come up and survive is a common bond. Development often comes with homogenization that can leave people feeling alienated from where they came. Whether it be Hmong communities in Dien Bien trying to figure out what comes after industrial cassava has ravaged the hillsides or the Red Dao in Lao Cai trying to figure out if it’s possible to send the next generation to school while protecting the forests that they hold so sacred. We spent years documenting and bearing witness to the loss of native biodiversity in all parts of Vietnam - from the Mekong Delta to the Northern Highlands - while tragically yielding short lived economic gains. 

These are the challenges and questions central to the conception of Sông Cái Distillery. 

There was a a bit of a detour during which time we were in the spice and agriculture commodity trade. For a short time, we were even supplying peppercorns and other spices to Pizza 4p’s (a popular pizza chain in Vietnam)! 

It wasn’t until one evening in 2017 while we were distilling rượu hồng mi (a traditional Hmong corn distillate) in Lào Cai that the idea of making alcohol became clear as a much more viable option to add value to agriculture than packaging and selling spices. 

And thus we were off! 

We started re-collecting and propagating native seeds wherever we could and storing ingredients ceiling high in a 30 square meter (~320 square feet) Hanoi apartment. Then came a small 2 liter still and running distillation and fermentation batches out of the bedroom of this same apartment. Mixing and adding different ingredients and ferments, some of which would become the Sông Cái products available today. 

Looking back, we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to grow out of that apartment into the distillery we have today, possible only with the support of you and our community. 

Yours truly,

Sông Cái Distillery.

The spirit of Việt Nam. For the unsung hero(s).