OUR STORY

We are Sông Cái Distillery. A distillery, winery, and fermentation lab located in Vietnam.

We make gin, amaro, rice wine (rượu cái), tonic(s), soda, đậu xị (Vietnamese miso), tương (Vietnamese shoyu), vinegar, and more.

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. 

We started Sông Cái Distillery 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’ve partnered with multi-generational foragers and farmers in Vietnam to source botanicals for what would become the first gin ever distilled in the country. Now, working with over 70 families, Sông Cái Distillery offers rural communities an incentive to preserve and plants botanicals, heirloom grains native to the region. Through our products we endeavor to protect centuries-old traditions for future generations.

Our name, Sông Cái, comes from the Vietnamese term for “Mother River.” In the Vietnamese tradition, rivers are metaphorically representative of the notion of totality and origin: all forces of nature, life, and spirituality stem and flow from a holistic “Mother River” .