Philly’s first Latinx-owned nano-distillery crafts Dominican-inspired single-malt whiskey

When Francisco Garcia’s family travels to the Dominican Republic, the bottles they bring back to Brooklyn aren’t from the airport’s duty-free shop. They’re empty.

Well, not empty-empty — cinnamon, cloves, and other island spices rattle around in the glass like shark teeth and seashells — but devoid of liquid. Back home, Garcia and his family unpack the bottles and fill them with red wine and rum, and after an undetermined period of infusing, their mamajuana, the unofficial drink of D.R., is ready to be uncorked and shared. “It’s just a festive thing,” Garcia says. “But everything about the Dominican Republic is festive.”

That celebratory tonic inspires Garcia’s Papa Juan, the flagship bottling of Strivers’ Row, the nano-distillery he founded in April 2021 in Philly’s Harrowgate community. The eight spices align with many in the traditional formula (plus a few secret liberties) but instead of rum and wine, the 32-year-old whiskey aficionado uses a 60-proof barrel of proprietary single-malt.

In his third-floor workshop, massive loft windows flood the space with light, making the gold foil lettering on Strivers’ teal labels glimmer, as well as illuminating the liquids within the flask-style bottles. Garcia fills plastic thimbles with Papas made with honey, an ongoing experiment, and without. The unsweetened glows a warm amber, while the honeyed version matches the pair of Timberlands stashed beneath a worktable among the snake plants and cocktail books.

“You have to try to be a little bit different and original because distilling really hasn’t changed in hundreds of years,” Garcia says.

The exponential growth of the craft distilling space, locally and nationally, compounds the challenge for a tiny operation like Strivers’ Row to cut through the noise of port-aged this and hard-seltzered that. Papa Juan was both an astute marketing move and a way to create a product with personal resonance.

“I didn’t start off saying this was going to be a Latino distillery, but it went that way. Bringing some culture into it just felt natural and comfortable.” Strivers’ Row is not only Philly’s smallest commercial distillery, it’s also the first owned by a Latinx person.

While Papa Juan and Ron Filadelfiano, Garcia’s elegant blackstrap molasses rum finished in charred American oak, bear Spanish names, the distillery does not. Strivers’ Row borrows from a tony block in Harlem, where Garcia lived and “became obsessed with the history of this neighborhood thriving with Black entrepreneurs in the early 1900s: a congressman, a famous surgeon, all these strivers accomplishing things.” He went through many names for the distillery, but kept coming back to Strivers’ Row. “It made a lot of sense for me, because of the history I enjoyed, but also, I think immigrants are all strivers.”

Garcia lived in a house with cement floors and tin roof until he was 4, when his parents emigrated from Villa Lobos, an hour inland from the Atlantic in the Dominican countryside, to Bushwick, Brooklyn, and opened a bodega. “I was a little kid behind the counter doing the cash register, going to Restaurant Depot and Jetro,” he says.

To him, his parents embody the definition of strivers. “My dad did a 15-year stint of 16-hours-a-day, no vacation. They didn’t travel even at the point where they could afford it. They opened five businesses. They own [the house] we grew up in in New York, property in the most popular city in the world.”

After attending public elementary and middle schools, Garcia got a scholarship to prep school in Connecticut, an experience that propelled him into Vanderbilt and Penn, then to a career on Wall Street with Goldman Sachs. But the entrepreneurial spirit in his DNA would not be ignored.

“My parents were never secretive about money, so I grew up aware of and comfortable with the idea of losing it and the risk behind [starting a business],” he says. To wit: Garcia opened Evergreen Ice Cream Co. in Bushwick in 2013 and closed the shop within a year when his heart was no longer in it. Six months later, he moved to Philly with his then-girlfriend, now-wife, Johanna Lou, who was starting med school at Temple.

He took a job with the city in the Department of Commerce, where he nurtured an interest in “how you make [cities] sustainable and resilient and equitable,” says Garcia. “The two biggest levers are capital, which is often the first barrier for minority [entrepreneurs], and politics.”

With finance experience from Wall Street, he learned the policy side on the local level while working for the city, then at the national level as a staffer on the Biden-Harris campaign. These on-the-job educations converge in Strivers’ Row, which is a distillery on its face, but more deeply, a vehicle to affect change. “I had a manager at the city used to say, ‘You can’t aspire to be something that you don’t see,’ so the easiest way for me have an impact is if I can make it.”

Strivers’ Row is already evolving its social media-fed, direct-to-consumer model to increase bar-and-restaurant representation and decode the PLCB establishment. Pepper Speese came on as distiller and resident mixologist in February, bringing cocktail expertise and plans to add amaro and bitters to the distillery’s product line of Papa Juan, Ron Filadelfiano, and a family of as-yet-unnamed single-malt whiskey (currently aging for a 2023 release).

Garcia passes the tastes of the Papas across the table, and both batches slide down easy. If mamajuana is what fuels a coro, Dominican slang for a celebratory get-together, Papa Juan is what you want to sip on after everyone goes home.

“I haven’t made it yet,” he says. “I’m far from making it,” but he’s striving.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is one of more than 20 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the city’s push toward economic justice. See all of our reporting at brokeinphilly.org.