Every bottle starts with a person and a machete. The families who farm our cane in Thạch Thành have worked these plots for generations, and the relationship is contractual in the boring sense and personal in every other sense.
We buy the whole harvest at a fixed price agreed before planting, which moves the weather risk off the farm and onto the distillery. It is the single thing growers ask for most often, and the single thing the commodity market never offers them.
We have cut cane on this land since my grandmother’s time. What changed is that somebody finally put the name of the place on the label.
Cane grower, Thạch Thành
Hand-cut, and why it costs more
Hand-cutting yields a cleaner stalk and a slower harvest. It also means a crew of people in a field at five in the morning, before the heat, doing work that a machine could do badly for a fraction of the price.
The premium shows up in the bottle as fresh-cut aroma. It shows up in Thạch Thành as school fees and roof repairs. Both are the point.
