Sông Cái Distillery
Brand Overview
Category
Vietnamese Spirits & Wines
Founders
Daniel Nguyen
Established
2018
Website
Sông Cái is a first-of-its-kind Vietnamese distillery bottling the taste of Việt Nam’s biodiverse terroir through gins and other spirits. Founded by Vietnamese-American sustainable agriculture visionary Daniel Nguyen, Sông Cái sources botanicals exclusively from long-standing farming and foraging H’mong, Red Dzao, and Kinh families. Sông Cái invests back into its partner rural communities through paying fair pricing for botanicals, funding reforestation programs, heirloom botanical preservation and propagation efforts, educational assistance for communities, and shared farming equipment and processing facilities.
Sông Cái Distillery’s spirits are distilled in hand-hammered direct-fired copper alembic pot stills. The brand’s inaugural Việt Nam Dry Gin has earned accolades for its reimagination of the dry gin category by using 16 heirloom Vietnamese ingredients like green turmeric, jungle pepper, black cardamom, and heirloom pomelo.
The name Sông Cái translates to “Mother River,” homage to the cradle of Vietnamese civilization (a concept found universal in Việt Nam) as well as to the distinctly Vietnamese spiritual relationship to the land: that all things come from and are interwoven with mother nature.