A heavy mist rolled across Makawao. The moisture enveloped Paul Turner’s agave fields and triggered a heady petrichor, the unmistakable scent of wet Earth.
“The plants are happy here,” said Turner, owner of Waikulu Distillery, a farm-to-bottle maker of blue agave spirits. “It’s a perfect crop for Hawai‘i.”
What began as an experiment with just a handful of plants has grown into a budding adult beverage business. Waikulu is the only distillery in Hawai‘i producing agave spirits, a distilled alcohol similar to tequila. The word “waikulu” in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i means “dripping water” and has historically been used to describe distilling alcohol, which drips slowly from the still.
Turner’s farm is home to some 3,000 agave tequilana destined for distillation. The spiky, blue-green plants, arranged in tidy rows across six acres, take roughly seven years to mature. The plant’s compact, bulbous core, known as the piña, is harvested by hand and brought to the property’s distinct, turquoise barn, where it’s cooked, crushed, fermented and distilled. About half of the spirits produced are placed in barrels for aging, while the rest are bottled and sold as a crisp, unaged “silver.” Both aged and unaged varieties are offered in the adjacent tasting room, which opened to visitors in 2023.
Agave aficionados tend to be extremely passionate. In fact, many of the young distillery’s visitors are tequila drinkers that spontaneously stop in after spying the agave fields from Baldwin Avenue.
“They’re driving by, and they see the plants, and they U-turn and come in, and they’re just like, ‘What the hell is going on?’”
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