To Make Great Cocktails, Bartenders Head to the Farm

Earlier this year, boats ferried guests through the canals of Mexico City’s Xochimilco to Chinampa del Sol, a pre-Hispanic floating farm that was, for that day, the site of a five-course farm-to-plate lunch paired with elegant cocktails. En route, guides from the Arca Tierra project, which connects farmers with bartenders, chefs, and consumers, explained that the many man-made islands in the canal belong to a massive agricultural project built to feed the Aztec empire centuries ago. These floating gardens are a UNESCO World Heritage site, an invaluable regional cooling mechanism, as well as a sustainable and wildly productive farm system that, if fully revitalized, could feed all of Mexico City.

Wine glasses in hand, guests toured the fields before sitting down to food prepared by Gustavo Macuitl and Ivan Rustico of Mexico City’s Cocinade Fieras, starting with a stunning wedge of bright purple “graffiti” cauliflower dressed with poblano chili sauce and black leaf-cutter ants.

The accompanying cocktail was the Space Invader, a cloudy tequila drink created by Alex Francis and Barney O’Kane of De Vie, a sustainability-focused bar that’s expected to open in Paris in the months ahead. Almost all the ingredients on the plates and in the glasses were sourced from the surrounding fields on Chinampa del Sol. “We macerated the purple cauliflower heads in neutral alcohol for 24 hours. The liquid was then coffee-filtered, diluted, and stabilized with sugar,” says O’Kane. “The drink was then fortified with tequila and an orgeat made from fava beans, which gives the drink a nutty, buttery flavor and texture.” In keeping with zero-waste measures, they take the fava bean residue and then dehydrate it, blitz it into a powder, and sprinkle it onto the drink as a garnish.

O’Kane and Francis are best-known for farm-focused drinks from the program at Little Red Door in Paris, one of several cocktail bars around the world that helped raise the stakes in the farm-to-glass movement. Some bar owners have forged tight partnerships with growers, whereas others, such as Tokyo’s Bar Ben Fiddich, Bar Trigona at the Four Seasons Hotel Kuala Lumpur, and Cartagena’s Alquímico, actually have their own bar farms.

There are some obvious benefits that come from a bar farm—notably, that it adds to the bar’s “story.”

There are some obvious benefits that come from a bar farm—notably, that it adds to the bar’s “story.” Bar Trigona, for example, has built its identity around the region’s stingless Trigona bees, and the honey harvested from its proprietary farm and apiary. Guests can adopt a beehive, do honey tastings, drink house-made honey wine, and learn all about this fascinating species of tiny bees. Recently, bar manager Rohan Matmary expanded the farm side of things by partnering with a farmer who will grow cacao exclusively for Trigona’s cocktail program.

These are the sorts of arrangements we’ve become used to hearing about at farm-to-table restaurants, where the advantage of farm ownership is obvious. It’s taken a little longer to see how bars can benefit, possibly partly because bartenders have spent much of the last decade or two intently focused on spirit-forward cocktails.

That’s starting to change, with many in the business searching for ways to be more environmentally sustainable and to offer ingredient-focused drinks with a sense of place. Perhaps unexpectedly, in the process of making the shift, many bar owners and teams have discovered that it also helps make bartending a more sustainable career path, by providing breaks and fresh inspiration.

“When you get so close to an ingredient and actually harvest it, it gives you something different,” says Hugo Togni, co-owner of Toronto’s Bar Pompette. “You can train your staff as much as you want, but to be able to talk about something they really know, not something that they’ve just heard of, there’s nothing comparable. And the customers can really feel it.”

While Bar Pompette doesn’t have a farm of its own, Togni works closely with a network of local farmers, and the entire bar team has packed up and gone on a half-dozen field trips to local farms to harvest everything from spruce tips to maple sap to make syrup. The farmers, in turn, use their relationship with bar owners to help deal with surplus and/or cosmetically challenged (but still perfectly edible) produce.

Last summer, for instance, the team at Bar Pompette rescued 126 pounds of split tomatoes from farmers in the Niagara region. They turned the tomatoes into the base for the bar’s Split and Crack cocktail, a savory drink that was available until this past June.

Like all bars with farms or that work closely with local agriculture, the bar staff has to be quick on their feet. That’s one constant with this project, since—whether it’s a lean year or a bumper crop—every harvest offers a fresh challenge to bar teams, and they need to plan in advance to have ingredients on hand over the course of the year. “In the harvest time, when the farm says to the team, ‘I have 5,000 kilograms [11,000 pounds] of plums,’ it’s now or never,” explains Timothée Prangé, the founder and a former business partner at Little Red Door, which, during the pandemic, went all-in on partnerships with local farmers. “You just have to say, ‘Okay, I’m taking all of them.’”

Turning more than a metric ton of produce into a product that can last all year requires careful planning, new equipment, and perhaps most important of all, space. “We had to expand our prep area from 11 square meters in the basement to a 60-square-meter lab,” recalls Prangé, whose main goal, initially, was to raise awareness about the importance of small independent farms.

Not all farm-focused bars have laboratories. But there is a correlation between an increased focus on fresh local produce and the recent rise of the cocktail lab. Pre-modern technology is still pretty efficient. However, selling the public on the value of ugly fruit is a lot easier with the help of rotovaps, centrifuges, and dehydrators used to make fava bean garnishes.

“We can extract a huge amount of fresh flavor, or zero in on a specific flavor, with these tools,” says Togni, who used both a centrifuge and a rotovap to deal with Pompette’s split tomatoes. “All the instruments that we have definitely help us stretch out the life of the product as long as possible, but also help us make them attractive in a sophisticated way.”

Joseph Simonson, head of cocktail and process development at Los Poblanos Historic Inn and Organic Farm in Albuquerque, New Mexico, says that, while a rotovap is intriguing, he doesn’t think “that level of nerdery” is scalable for a property where they often serve 500 people per day. Plus, he’s clearly more excited about the unique varieties of herbs and fruit growing on the property’s farm that simply can’t be sourced from a store. “I challenge myself to never make the same drink twice at Bar Campo, so I’m always trying to put new flavors together,” he says. “That’s easy though, because with the wide variety of infusions we’ve made, really, the possibilities are endless.

Although lavender, first planted in 1999, is the marquee plant at Los Poblanos, this regenerative agriculture project is also home to an apiary, indigenous crops like string beans, blue corn, and pumpkin, as well as many herbs that define the cocktail program. Given that focus, Dylan Storment, director of wine and spirits, says the incorporation of fresh ingredients falls along one of two paths: simple macerations, or vapor distillation. Los Poblanos makes two gins in a copper pot still—another technology used to deal with agricultural surpluses.

“Because we have so many new and different things coming in all the time, we have to be constantly thinking. And that’s what keeps it exciting.”—Natália Faustino

Creativity is always a big part of cocktail bartending. But the mixologists who work with farmers emphasize how inspirational it is to be in close contact with ingredients that are still in the soil. At Little Saint in Healdsburg, California, for example, beverage manager Natália Faustino recalls the first time she saw fresh fennel in the field and immediately thought how to showcase it in a cocktail. “I don’t want to say that we’re forced to be creative,” says Faustino. “But because we have so many new and different things coming in all the time, we have to be constantly thinking. And that’s what keeps it exciting.”

Faustino shares the planning with farm general manager Samantha Gregory. The pair are constantly talking through Slack, spreadsheets, messaging, and regular in-person meetings, so that Faustino can stay on top of the next harvest. “I just love coming to meet with Natália and bringing a bunch of different sizes of each kind of cucumber to talk through which one is the best option for a drink,” Gregory says. “I love working with these absolute artists who think a lot differently than I do. They take this thing that I’m really proud of, and transform it into something absolutely incredible.”

With industrial agriculture, farmers, even though they have valuable insights, rarely get to collaborate with the folks who process their ingredients. Bar farms change that relationship and make cross-pollination possible. “We’ll have staff come out and harvest with us and they’ll process a lot of those fresh ingredients at the farm,” Gregory says. “Sometimes an ingredient has literally been out of the field for two hours before it becomes a part of a drink. We can really capture the essence of things that way, and it gives the staff respite from the craziness of the kitchen and bar.

At Little Red Door, Timothée Prangé saw the value of taking a break from the stress and repetition of bartending by adding a lab to the enterprise. All staff were trained in all roles—floor, bar, and lab. And the team rotated duties so that nobody got stuck closing the bar 250 nights a year. “That way you didn’t have to just work nights,” he says, noting that he used to be a waiter himself, often working 12-hour shifts. “I think this is good for the social life and a healthier life for a lot of people.”

“Sustainability isn’t just about a carbon footprint—it’s also about making work life more humane.”

Prangé has received a lot of press for his political stance against agricultural corporations and his work raising awareness about the importance of small, local farms. But sustainability isn’t just about a carbon footprint—it’s also about making work life more humane. “It’s easy to forget the social side,” says Prangé. “But you need to provide a good life for your employees.”

At Bar Pompette, everyone spends one shift a week in the lab. In the months ahead, Togni hopes to launch a pilot project that offers staff a chance to take a break and help during peak harvest at one of several farms, in exchange for a two- or three-day break from busy summer nights at the bar. As with many things, the pandemic revealed problems often ignored in the “before times,” including bartender burnout. It might have shone a light on some solutions, though. It was during the lockdown that Little Red Door pivoted to support farmers.

On the other side of the hemisphere, Alquímico in Cartagena offered its remote farm—eight hours away, in the mountains of Colombia’s coffee axis—as a sanctuary for any and all staff members who wanted to make the sojourn. More than 20 members of the team took the partners up on the offer. While there, they enjoyed the escape from the stress of quarantining in the city, and learned to manage the apiary, sheepfolds, and chicken coops.

During the pandemic, the biophilia hypothesis—the theory proposed by E.O. Wilson in 1984 that loving nature has a genetic basis—gained new popularity, partly because the closure of indoor public spaces nudged us to explore the great outdoors. While biophilia is still theoretical, there’s a growing body of research that supports the idea that being in nature and working with plants and animals is associated with reduced stress levels. One study suggests that working with soil increases serotonin levels. This research isn’t surprising to many, given the overwhelming anecdotal evidence we often hear.

“I was visiting the goats and alpacas earlier today when I was out grabbing herbs for an infusion,” says Simonson of Los Poblanos. “You get a nice mountain vista amid the guinea fowl running around, and you use your hands to connect with nature. It’s definitely a break from the hustle in a rejuvenating way.”

Whether or not it’s an innate human tendency, Simonson says he feels better and more mindful when he makes his forays into the farm part of the property. Unfortunately, few of us have enough time and opportunity to make it a daily part of our lives. “But as bartenders, we’re forced to and it’s a blessing, even when we don’t feel we have the time,” he says. “It kind of forces you to slow down and be in the present moment and connected to the land.

“And that all translates to the guest, too, which is important because we’re here to be ambassadors of the farmers and the land of the Rio Grande Valley,” Simonson says. “Being out there quickly revitalizes that connection.”