While spirits conglomerates and white celebrity venture capitalists scramble over each other to profit from the “next mezcal,” Peru is firing its first fusillade in the maguey wars with a distillate made from agave cordillerensis and A. americana expansa grown in the central highlands of the Andes.
And you can dip your bill into three varieties of the spirit at Silver Lake’s Causita, a buzzing new Nikkei Peruvian restaurant opened at the end of last year by Ricardo Zarate, the Lima-raised L.A. chef so often responsible for introducing Angelenos to dynamic new flavors and aspects of Peruvian food and culture in the past.
Causita’s bar program includes a mighty list of Japanese whiskies and well over 40 mezcales, in addition to creative cocktails using bases like Pisco, Japanese gin, and barley shochu. It’s in a tiny section called “Not Tequila Or Mezcal” that the words Aqará Agave de los Andes, first leap out at us, introducing a Peruvian agave spirit produced by a company named Chopin S.A.C., in conjunction with the Peruvian non-profit Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina.
The Aqará website doesn’t contain a ton of backstory, though according to the Mezcalitas website, the brand was created by one Marco Suarez, who comes from the agave-rich Andean Highlands region of Caraz, Peru, a name that, according to Aqará’s website, derives from the Quechua word “qaaray,” meaning “land of the agaves.”