How one tequila lover turned a Makawao bike park into Hawaii’s only blue agave distillery.
story by Todd A. Vines
photographs by Rachel Olsson
A heavy mist rolled across Makawao. The moisture enveloped Paul Turner’s agave fields and triggered a heady petrichor, the unmistakable scent of wet Earth.
“The plants are happy here,” said Turner, owner of Waikulu Distillery, a farm-to-bottle maker of blue agave spirits. “It’s a perfect crop for Hawai‘i.”
What began as an experiment with just a handful of plants has grown into a budding adult beverage business. Waikulu is the only distillery in Hawai‘i producing agave spirits, a distilled alcohol similar to tequila. The word “waikulu” in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i means “dripping water” and has historically been used to describe distilling alcohol, which drips slowly from the still.
Turner’s farm is home to some 3,000 agave tequilana destined for distillation. The spiky, blue-green plants, arranged in tidy rows across six acres, take roughly seven years to mature. The plant’s compact, bulbous core, known as the piña, is harvested by hand and brought to the property’s distinct, turquoise barn, where it’s cooked, crushed, fermented and distilled. About half of the spirits produced are placed in barrels for aging, while the rest are bottled and sold as a crisp, unaged “silver.” Both aged and unaged varieties are offered in the adjacent tasting room, which opened to visitors in 2023.
Agave aficionados tend to be extremely passionate. In fact, many of the young distillery’s visitors are tequila drinkers that spontaneously stop in after spying the agave fields from Baldwin Avenue.
“They’re driving by, and they see the plants, and they U-turn and come in, and they’re just like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”
Taking a Shot
“I happened on this by accident,” said Turner, who got his first blue agave plants by mail in 2011 and put them in the ground for landscaping. Turner soon found that Makawao’s temperate climate and reliable rainfall produced agave that grew larger and matured faster than that grown elsewhere.
“The plants are super resilient to drought and extreme temperatures, but they’re only happy in a narrow temperature range,” Turner said. “Here, all day, every day, they’re pretty much growing.”
For the self-professed lifelong lover of tequila, making the leap from landscaping to liquor may have been natural, but it was a leap, nonetheless.
Turner’s first business venture on the Valley Isle was Bike Park Maui, a sprawling space with trails and berms for mountain bikes that opened in 2014, not long after Turner’s first agave plants arrived. Within a few years, bike spokes gave way to agave spikes. Turner closed the bike park, planting more and more blue agave, sowing the seeds of what would become Waikulu Distillery.
“I didn’t always want to be a farmer,” Turner said. “That kind of came when I moved to Maui. But distilling has always been out there, fascinating me. The big thing was the added value, turning something you grow into booze, and the machinery and methods to do that was really what was interesting to me.
“So, why not give it a go?”
The company filled its first bottle in 2022. The tasting room and small-group farm tours soon followed. In 2023, Waikulu Distillery sold 5,600 bottles in its first full year of production. Despite limited distribution, the company is on track to double that number in 2024. Outside of the farm, Waikulu spirits are only available at select local restaurants and a handful of Maui retailers.
Getting Into the Spirit
While most people are familiar with tequila, the term “agave spirit” is less commonly used.
An agave spirit is any distilled spirit made from an agave plant, the most recognizable being tequila and mezcal. Unlike other agave spirits, tequila and mezcal enjoy a geographic distinction, designating spirits made in specific states in Mexico, much the same way that true champagne designates sparkling wine that specifically hails from the Champagne region of northeastern France.
“There’s a culture around tequila that we respect, but we’re trying to develop our own lingo and a culture that’s more Hawaiian style, not just copy Mexico,” Turner said.
Though Waikulu Distillery’s spirits are similar to tequila, the blue agave plants they’re made from have shown distinct differences from their counterparts in Mexico. A mature Maui piña weighs nearly 400 pounds, roughly four times the weight of those grown south of the border. (One piña recently weighed in at more than 600 pounds.) Local agave plants boast a higher sugar content, too, making the piña sweeter.
“If you look at all the other spirits, they’re made from really benign ingredients: sugar, corn, potatoes, barley. They couldn’t be more boring in their natural state. Whereas this plant is badass and prehistoric. It’s not edible until it’s cooked. There’s an acid in there that’ll rip your throat apart. And the spines, and needles and everything. It’s a wrangly plant.”
Agave distilleries have popped up across a handful of U.S. states in recent years, including California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. In Hawai‘i, there is no agave industry. Just Turner.
“Tequila has always been my spirit of choice. Now, completely understanding the process, I can see why people get so passionate about it.”
Sowing Seeds of Success
Turner moved to Maui from Colorado in 2008. A design pioneer in the bicycle industry, Turner is credited with crafting the first front suspension fork for a mountain bike, a common feature today but novel a generation ago. He started the bicycle-suspension company RockShox with a partner in 1989, which grew to employ hundreds and eventually went public. The hands-on Turner discovered, however, that corporate success demanded a change in his role with the company.
“I was the creative person behind the company, but it got to the point where I couldn’t do creative work,” Turner said. “I had to go to board meetings and production meetings. That’s not going to happen again.”
Turner’s vision is to keep the Waikulu Distillery brand boutique.
“The plan is to not be much different than we are now,” Turner said. “It’s really frustrating, if you’re trying to do a craft, to have that disconnect from your customers. The bigger you get, the more you’re pulled away from so many parts of the process.”
The entire Waikulu Distillery team consists of just four employees in addition to Turner, one of which is Viviana Amezola. As manager of Waikulu Distillery, Amezola is a familiar face around the farm and often engages with visitors. For Amezola, it’s an opportunity to expound on how the small team is doing more than just making booze — they’re telling a story.
“Everyone is drinking this huge journey,” Amezola said. “These plants have been here for a long time, and the entire process is just so hands-on and small-batch. It really makes you appreciate the plant, craft and hard work that went into it.”
