How Agave Spirits Are Made on Maui at Waikulu Distillery

“It was a happy accident,” Oliver Welch recalls. It was June of 2022, his first summer out of college on the gloomy east coast; he’s on Maui to surf, dive, throw pottery, and hopefully find a farming gig to support the whole thing before going home to Santa Barbara. “I’m at dinner with my dad’s friend and he tells me that tomorrow he’s going to a new agave spirit operation that just popped up. ‘Want to join?’”

The very first bottling of Waikulu Distillery’s agave spirits had taken place just a month prior, in May – a whole decade of preparation leading up to the occasion. “They weren’t open to the public yet,” Welch says, “so on the tour, I asked if they needed any help.” Three weeks later, the company owner Paul Turner called him to say he landed the job. “And that was two and a half years ago.”

Welch got right to the work harvesting blue Weber agave plants and preparing them for distillation. If you’re wondering what agave spirits are, you’ll know the most popular one under a different name. “We can’t call our spirits ‘Tequila,’” Welch notes, “it’s like how certain sparkling wines can only be called ‘champagne’ if they come from a certain region of France.”

In order for agave spirits to be legally labeled ‘Tequila,’ they must be made with blue Weber agave and produced in five specific regions of Mexico: Nayarit, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Tamaulipas, and finally Jalisco, which is the heart of tequila production. If your distillery is based anywhere else, you’re making agave spirits; call it ‘Tequila’ and you’ll receive “classic internet outrage,” as Welch puts it, potentially followed by a lawsuit by Consejo Regulador del Tequila. 

So how do agave spirits grown and distilled on Maui compare? “The climate you’re growing plants in will affect the flavor a lot. The plants here grow bigger and sweeter on average, maturing in about six to eight years – a touch faster than in Jalisco. The taste is a bit more floral and brighter, less vegetal and funky.”

In 2011, Turner started with only 200 blue agave plants, which over time shot out clones – or pups, as they’re playfully called. “By the time I started working there, he had propagated 4,000 agave plants.”

Welch gave me a detailed rundown of the agave spirits distilling process, starting by harvesting the agave plant when it is 6 to 8 years old but – importantly – before it blooms. “Once the agave blooms, all the sugar you want from the plant is used to grow a tall stalk that will flower and produce seeds. It’s called their death bloom.”

Farmers then use a coa – a long, nearly 10-pound hoe equipped with a razor sharp, rounded end, to begin slicing the leaves off. “Every plant has to be harvested by hand,” Welch notes. “The leaves are so fibrous, the process would gum up anything with a chain.” The leaves are left to decompose in the field as agave spirits are made only from the plant’s heart, or piña.

“Our average harvest weight for just the heart of the plant is 150 to 350 pounds; our biggest one was 635 pounds!” The hearts are rolled onto a low trailer and chopped next to a highly-insulated, unpressurized oven where they’ll be steamed for 40 hours. “Big producers do the cooking process in autoclaves in 9 hours, but you just don’t get the same flavor development as you do with a slow cook.” 

The steamer turns the agave brown as the sugars caramelize. The chunks of steamed agave taste like molasses and sweet potatoes. Into the spinning crusher it goes to separate the sugar from the plant fibers; once the sugar is dissolved in water, it sits in a fermenter for five to six days. “It’s just the wild yeast from the plant that’s doing the fermentation,” Welch adds. 

There are two distillation processes to make agave spirits edible. “The second distillation gets rid of what is called the heads; that’s the stuff that made the moonshiners go blind,” Oliver warns. Once the spirit is distilled, it’s either bottled as a silver agave spirit or aged in oak barrels. 

Waikulu’s unique flavor has won it many accolades, including Best of Class at 2023 International Spirits Competition and gold at the 2024 LA Invitational Wine and Spirits Challenge. Its luxurious product design has also garnered attention in the design world. But if you’re licking your chops and ready to taste Waikulu’s product, you’re out of luck. 

As of now, Turner hopes to keep Waikulu’s production limited to Maui. With its small team of about seven people, Waikulu is able to practice traditional agave spirit making techniques and maintain a closed loop agricultural system, meaning all byproducts of production are used again, from fertilizing fields to erasing sharpie markings off the equipment. Plus, at their small production volume, they’re unable to make shipping to the mainland a possibility. 

“I bring like…six bottles with me in my suitcase whenever I go home.” Welch admits. Santa Barbara has been his family’s home for three generations now. He developed his love for surfing and diving at Carpinteria’s beaches and ceramics at Cate School.

Welch has set up three pottery wheels on the island, his pottery proudly displayed in Waikulu’s tasting room. “I’ve gotten commissioned by places like The Four Seasons and their concept restaurants to create tens of pots or glasses. I surf, I do pottery, and I go to work.” Oliver says. 

I say, “It sounds like a fantasy.” Follow Oliver Welch’s ceramic journey at his Instagram @oliverwelchceramics, and see more from Waikulu Distillery on their website or Instagram, @waikuludistillery.