Lucky Chow

- [Danielle] In this episode of Lucky Chow, we drink our way from Oahu to Brooklyn.

Visiting friends along the way who own their own businesses that reflect their drinking culture.

We'll drop in on an award-winning gastro pub, where classic tropical cocktails are given a shot of Asian umami with a side of Brooklyn attitude.

In Brooklyn, we'll visit with two childhood friends who open a bar infused with their Indian heritage.

We'll even take a walk in a field where heirloom sugar cane is grown to make a rum reflecting the uniquely Hawaiian terroir.

We'll hear the story of three friends who quit their engineering jobs to run an experimental micro brewery focused on local flavor.

It's all about mixing cocktails, characters, and culture.

(upbeat music) Nick, Kevin and Derek were nuclear engineers working in Pearl Harbor when they decided to turn their hobby of home brewing into a business.

I met with Nick in their new Waipio location to sample their wildly popular Beer Lab concept: a small batch brewery where the three lab rats can experiment with ingredients and techniques.

Rather than catering to tourist ideas of what Hawaiian beer should taste like, Nick and his buddies proudly celebrate the Asian mashup of flavors that they grew up with.

(low tempo music) Rotating brews, featuring flavors like ube and calamansi dot the fun menu, which includes omakase selections like a tekka maki growler.

Beer Lab even has a department of zymurgy where you can pick up home brewing supplies to learn more about the science of fermentation.

- This is really the heart and soul of our company here.

- Uh-huh - [Nick] This is our brewing facility.

So, we brew all of the beer that we send out to all of our locations right here.

And this tank, we just brewed everything today.

Everything's still warm and hot, but this is called our mash tun where it all starts.

So what we do is we soak mainly grain.

So starch.

- Okay.

- We could soak some starch, soak grain, and we convert that starch into sugar through heating it.

After we really, we soak it in here for about an hour, we extract those sugars and then we're gonna rinse all of the grain in here through that colander.

This is our boil kettle, which we just brew here in.

- Uh-huh.

So we boil things to get a lot of the off-flavors and chemicals to evaporate into the air.

This final vessel that we run it through, is called our whirlpool.

So it really just spins the beer, drops out a lot of the solids, gets us a little clear, better, cleaner product.

We'll run it through our heat exchanger, cool everything down.

And that's where we head to all of our fermentation tanks or our cold side.

It allows us to control the temperature, add the yeast, and really turn that sugar water into beer.

So you feel free to kind of grab a handful, to take a look at it.

And then most importantly, try to take a bite of it.

It's very, very interesting.

You're gonna taste quite a bit of sweetness.

- Yeah, surprisingly so.

- Yeah.

It's kind of interesting to kind of see that this is like, this is really the basic ingredients that really starts, and makes beer.

- [Danielle] For home brewing enthusiasts, beer lab also hosts seminars on topics such as off-flavor sensory workshops, and a mead making workshop with local manoa honey.

I was excited to find out more about how Nick and his buddies turned their interests and curiosity about their cultures into their brews.

So are you from Hawaii?

- I am born and raised in Hawaii.

- So what is the concept behind Beer Lab?

- We used to be engineers from Pearl Harbor.

Myself and my two other founders.

And yeah, we were just home brewers brewing in our backyard.

That brewing at home, turned into brewing a little more, sharing with friends.

And that really turned into, you know, just wanting to share what we call, you know, share the craft of beer with others.

So we always said, if we're ever gonna really quit our jobs to go into this brewing, we want brewing beer to still be fun.

So a lot of the beers that we brew here, it really pushes the envelope on a lot of the local ingredients that we can find.

Trying to incorporate that, incorporating different green bills, different styles, different water chemistries.

Just to try to create and experiment and really see what's the best beer we think we can make.

It's the flavors that we grew up with, you know, kind of being born and raised here.

You can kind of look back as Hawaii is just this giant melting pot of cultures.

And the things that we think are local and are from our culture, our heritage really is just a blend; a mishmash of all of these different cultures that, you know, we just kind of took the best of everything.

(Danielle chuckles) - [Nick] So, you know, myself, I'm Chinese- half Chinese, half-Okinawan.

Yeah, it's really the waves of people that come and they get integrated into the culture.

And then the next wave comes and add some more fun flavors, adds some more different foods.

And we all get to blend that all into the culture.

- How fun!

So how many flavors do you have?

- Oh boy, we must have made over 500 plus different styles of beers.

(bouncy mood music) - [Nick] The first beer we have here is called our "Nimbus 2020".

Great beer.

It's what we call a hazy IPA.

So lots of hops, very low bitterness.

Great mouth feel.

Very fruity, full flavor.

This is called "I Yam Your Father" (Nick chuckles) A very fun name, but it really incorporates ube, or sweet potato, into one of our hazy IPAs.

Great flavor, great color.

And you get a really, really nice kind of rounded finish from that sweetness.

This is called our "Mililani Red".

One of the beers we actually opened and started with back in 2016.

Again, it's a red beer.

It is actually on the very, very dark, dark end of what a red should be.

And really it's named after the dirt that comes from Mililani or the red dirt coming from Central Walk.

This is called "Golf Mobile."

This is actually one of the newest lines of beer that we are actually experimenting with.

Very, very, very light, light, light clean lager that we've had coming up, brand new today.

So it's a beer designed for drinking in hot sun, here in Hawaii.

Great golf beer, great softball beer.

I just wanna share kind of the culture and the people.

You know, it's a very welcoming place.

(chipper music) - As an estate distillery, KoHana both grows and distills on the very land where their Hawaiian rum agricole is bottled.

"From farm to bottle", as the founders, Jason Brand and Robert Dawson put it.

Shortly after they both moved from the mainland, they met over a shared pursuit to lead a more purposeful life in Hawaii.

Here in Waimea valley, they found that purpose in KoHana Distillery.

Where they are growing over 30 heirloom varieties of Hawaiian sugar cane, and expanding production.

At the distillery, we got to sample the freshly pressed juice of a single varietal of cane.

Then the rums made from those canes, and finally, the barrel age selections.

- [Jason] At the core of this distillery is our stewardship of the land.

- [Danielle] Mmmhmm.

And if we're gonna take something from it, we have to give it back.

Our company has actually carbon negative.

We actually have a- - [Danielle] Congratulations.

- [Jason] Yeah.

And it's a function of being a farmer and a distiller.

- [Danielle] Mm.

- You know, our fields are way larger than whatever we're gonna use commercially at the distillery.

- [Danielle] Nearly a thousand years ago, when the first Polynesians set sail for the Hawaiian islands, they brought with them heirloom varieties of sugar cane, or coke.

It produced a juice that had medicinal and spiritual value, and they planted it around their homes for use in their daily lives.

In the 1800s, the table sugar industry moved into Hawaii and slowly the heirloom canes were replaced.

- Agricole is a French way of making rum that originated down in Martinique in the West Indies.

And we call ourselves a Hawaiian agricole.

They call themselves a rum agricole, and we are just nodding to their style.

- [Tiffany] You wanna think of agricole rum like you would a wine.

- [William] Okay.

- [Tiffany ] And how there's different vintages.

And terrior plays a huge part in agricole rum.

So we could be growing the same sugar cane variety here at our Kunia farm and growing the same one up on the north shore, where there it's getting tons of salt in the air.

Especially in the wintertime.

You can literally see the salt in the air.

And so it's gonna change the way that plant tastes.

So this one's gonna get all of its color from the inside of the barrel.

From that wood.

It's charred on the inside.

We took a part a barrel.

So you can actually see that char on the inside.

But you can really see as we're barrel aging, that rum is literally soaking through the wood and evaporating out.

And that's known as the angel share.

And then whatever is stuck in the wood is the devil's cut.

(mid tempo music) - [Tiffany] So this is a marriage of three local farms, right?

The local cacao, local honey, and of course our sugar cane that we grow ourselves.

- [Danielle] These daiquiris are insane.

- [Tiffany] They're so refreshing.

- [Danielle] And they're so they're cute!

- [Tiffany] They're perfect for the beach or- - [Danielle] Yes.

A picnic moment.

- A picnic?

Yeah.

- [Danielle] A date night.

- It's very crafted.

- [William] Yeah.

- We took a year to really come up with these flavors.

Our entire farm team, as part of our company, we're not outsourcing, you know, other farmers to do the job for us.

We're actually doing it in-house.

So what better way to tell stories than over some rum?

- [Danielle] Absolutely.

- HipaHipa!

- Yeah!

HipaHipa!

- [William and Tiffany] HipaHipa!

(glasses clink) (Danielle laughs) (soft atmospheric music) - [Danielle] What does KoHana mean?

- And so, "ko" is the Hawaiian word for sugar cane.

"Hana" means work.

So the combination of the two words thus, is "the work of the cane."

We're the only cane farm on Oahu.

And we're the first true farm to bottle rum distillery in the state of Hawaii.

And still the only one who's a hundred percent We grow a hundred percent of everything we make into rum.

Most rum in the world is made from molasses, which is an industrial byproduct of the manufacture of sugar.

One to 2% of the rum in the world is actually made for freshly pressed cane juice, but much, much later in history that people start doing that, which was to treat sugar cane as a fruit and make rum the way you'd make cognac.

And, and so it's, our process is almost more like cognac-making or wine and cognac-making than it is traditional rum-making.

Sugar cane actually existed in Hawaii before contact with the West.

In fact, the Polynesian seafarers brought as many as, possibly, 50 different varieties of sugar cane to Hawaii a thousand years ago.

- And they started to grow that here?

- They grew it here for medicinal and spiritual reasons.

These are native, what you call native, wine cane or heirloom cane species.

There're 11 different varieties in this field.

- Uh-huh We grow 34 in entirety.

That one right there is called manulele, over here's laukona, that's kea.

- [Robert] When the plantations came in, they didn't like the Hawaiian canes because they were disease resistant.

They did things called lodging, which means they fall over.

They throw a lot of tassels, which means they flower.

So they developed these commercial hybrids for Hawaii, which were great, but there were hybrids of multiple canes and we wanted to grow these heirloom canes.

They were directly tied to the culture and the community that had been lost over the last 150 years.

If you look at this cane, kea is the Hawaiian word for "white".

- Uh-huh - If you look at this cane, it's white.

This is the best growing season right now.

It'll really, really start popping in the heat, in the summer.

So it grows a little slower in the winter.

- Uh-huh.

And then every year it basically rejuvenates- - [Robert] Sugar cane is a grass.

- Okay, It's a grass.

- [Robert] To some extent, think of it as like mowing your lawn.

It does grow back.

- [Danielle] Wow!

- Who's cutting it?

- Oh, why don't you show me how, and then I'll do the rest of the work.

- So the best thing to do first, is you grab and you probably- better shoes than you have would be good.

It's good to knock it down first.

That way you're cutting- You never want to cut toward yourself.

You want to cut away from yourself.

(sugar cane rustling) - [Danielle] Oh.

- So this one seems ready.

- There you go.

You heard a crack and so just hit it hard.

(knife cuts sugar cane) (sugar cane rustles) - There we go!

(Robert ) All right!

- [Robert] This is the only ingredient that rum is- Our rum is made from this: the juice of this cane and yeast.

And that's it.

There's two ingredients.

We don't do anything more.

(blade hits sugar cane) (Danielle bites into sugar cane) - Mmmm.

So sweet - [Robert] Yeah, that's sweet, and grassy, and flavorful.

- It's like bubble gum.

You know, you can chew on it.

- You see how fibrous the plant is itself.

This is actually an ancient- It acted as an ancient toothbrush to the Hawaiian people.

Where they grew chewing canes, soft canes that were easy to chew.

Not rigid, tall canes like we grew for commercial production.

You wanted juice.

These fibers, as you're chewing on the cane actually would cut down on plaque and things like that.

And the Polynesians actually had, really robust teeth partially because of the fact that they were regularly chewing something that was taking off the plaque.

And if you needed to get a quick pick me up, this is nature's Gatorade.

(Danielle chuckles) I mean, it's highly nutritious, but it's got a lot of sugar- - It does!

And a lot of water!

- It's a lot of water.

- It's a great walking cane, right?

- Yeah.

I moved here over, you know, whatever, I think 12, 13 years ago, now.

And my wife and I called it the 13-year-plan, 'cuz we wanted to raise our son, kindergarten to college, and then take it from there.

But we're still here, so- - Right.

- Still doing this.

So we're past the 13 year plan.

My boy has done great, I couldn't ask for a better community to raise him and my- giving me an opportunity to really chase my own dream.

- Right.

- With Jason's help.

I mean the two of us have started something that didn't exist before and created it from, from literally nothing.

And, and that's been very satisfying.

We clearly, as, an outsider coming in and stepping into an area that that does have spiritual significance to the people who brought it here before us.

So we want, are always try to be as respectful and mindful as possible.

Always, always talking to the community, talking to the experts in the field and making sure that everything we're doing is, is truly respectful of this.

'Cuz this is an opportunity.

I mean, how many people get an opportunity to move to Hawaii, and grow ancient canes and make them into rum.

And that's a blessing I have.

So I feel I have a responsibility always to give back.

(moody guitar music) - [Danielle] Robert and Jason produce a nectar that is not only delicious, but is also a way for the two friends to help preserve native Hawaiian culture.

They were outsiders looking in just over a decade ago, but now they're well on their way to forging deep bonds with Hawaiian culture.

And to spreading that love through the work of the cane.

(moody guitar music) (upbeat music) - [Danielle] On Hotel Street, in Honolulu's historic Chinatown, James Beard award-winning chef Robin Maii, brings her Hawaiian heritage to the table at her gastro pub, Fete.

Alongside the food, Robin's cocktail program embodies the adventurousness of Hawaii's culinary scene.

Riffing off of classic beach-side cocktails like the Mai Tai, but adding locally sourced Asian-inflected ingredients and 21st century techniques.

- [Robin] So if you look at our dishes, they seem very simple looking maybe, or even the way that the menu reads.

But as soon as you take a bite, you know, that there's like these different layers.

And so even with the cooks, when they start with us and they're like, "oh, we didn't know all these things went into like this seemingly very simple thing."

- Yeah.

- And there's all these steps that really, you know, like- it's a labor of love.

I love that the- it gets really exciting when the bartenders start experimenting.

And when they're working on a new cocktail, because they look around the walk-in and they look around dry goods and then Harry like- I think he's so awesome about it.

He's like, "chef, you order me this?"

I'm like, "yes!"

- You know, people think of Hawaii as the land of the Mai Tais.

And there's a place for that.

There's a place for daiquiris.

I certainly love them, but there's also this new cocktail culture that is beyond just the heritage cocktails.

- Yes.

- Fete's bartender, Harry Chen, gave me a low-down on Hawaii's local cocktail scene.

While making some of Fete's juiciest cocktails, such as Flower Power and Hotel Ghost, which includes a blend of spirits with local flavors like lilicoi, guava, and mamaki tea.

- So the cocktail culture in Honolulu is very experimental right now.

I think... Hawaii is going through, and has been going through, just kind of hungry for information and hungry for new things.

Kind of trend in food and drink.

- [Danielle] Yeah.

- And I think it's a very exciting time to be in Hawaii right now, because you're starting to see a lot of new things.

So in our Mai Tai, we start with fresh lime juice- always fresh here.

So this year is our house banana jam.

- Ooh, that sounds delicious.

- We're doing orgeat, which is a bitter almond syrup.

And then, dry curacao.

We use a light rum infused with local mamaki tea.

And finally we have our KoHana rum.

(cocktail shaker clangs) - [Harry] Cherry with an orange peel.

We're doing a Egg White Sour, which involves little bit of egg white to give it a velvety, you know, silky kind of texture.

We do a little bit of lemon, just a little dash of simple syrup to sweeten it.

And then we're using two different types of spirits.

One is a Ramazzotti Rosato.

Ramazzotti is an Amaro brand.

This is their aperitif, which has a nice peachiness, little bitterness, a lot of orange.

Finally, one ounce of the - [Harry And Danielle] Mezcal.

- [Harry] Yes.

(hand tapping cocktail shaker) Lots of ice in this one.

(cocktail shaker clangs) (cocktail shaker snaps) - [Danielle] That looks beautiful.

Milky and frothy.

- [Harry] Finally, just a little pinch of dried rose petals on top.

This is probably my personal favorite drink.

I love Old Fashioneds.

A few dashes of our (indistinct) bitters.

We are sweetening it with, instead of simple syrup, we're using a reduced sugar cane.

So it's important not to shake an Old Fashioned because you don't want to quote, unquote, "bruise the liquor."

(smooth jazz music) - Finally, we garnish an orange peel.

- [Danielle] Mmm.

Well, if you- - [Harry] Cheers!

- [Danielle] -taste with your eyes, it certainly looks gorgeous.

- [Harry] (softly) Yeah.

- [Danielle] Robin Maii calls Fete a Brooklyn-Hawaii hapa baby, as a tribute to the time she spent cooking in Brooklyn.

So we headed to Brooklyn, to see how a bar born of the founders' Indian heritage, took form in their adopted home.

Rishi Rajpal and Avi Singh have been friends since their childhoods in New Delhi.

For as long as they can remember, food and drinking always went hand in hand.

Growing up, inviting friends and family over for a drink wasn't a simple affair.

It was an all-out production where every inch of the cocktail tables were covered in delicious snacks.

Having a drink together was actually sharing a feast.

This is the inspiration behind Sama Street: their hot cocktail bar in Green Point, Brooklyn.

- So you guys are childhood friends who grew up in India together, right?

- Rishi and I met when I was four years old, and Rishi was eight.

It was back in '98.

And yeah, we've been, our parents have been friends and we've been friends since then.

- Well, the both of you sort of come to being restaurateurs accidentally.

You had a career in consulting, right?

- That's right.

Yeah.

- And, and Rishi, you were at a tech startup.

- Yeah.

- Growing up, it was always in my head that I wanted to do something in this industry.

But I didn't really have the guts to do it.

So I went to college, went the typical route, went to business school.

Kind of just fell along the path, and went into consulting, because most of my other classmates were getting into consulting.

I realized like, you know, what am I doing here?

I really didn't enjoy it.

And just around that same time, Rishi was feeling the same thing.

And that's when we kind of had a few drinks, decided, you know what?

Now was the time that we should do this.

Because if we don't do it now, when are we gonna do it?

When we used to be out for drinks, or go to friends' houses, or even out to a bar to get drinks, food was always a big part of every experience.

You know, I remember going to Rishi's house and it was always, there's always passed around appetizers and lots of food laid out on the table because food just always pairs with drinks for us.

- And also food is like a great vessel for conversations and meeting new people, even growing up in, in India is, like, all the food that we had at home was all small plates.

Everyone just shared things.

And We wanted to bring our same nostalgic feeling growing up into a place that we started with.

Like, the communal tables, the shared plates where two dinners over here can make friends with another diner over here, which we've seen happen as well in the past, which has been beautiful.

- So when you were thinking about opening a place, why did you kind of choose this format?

That was a little bit more innovative on the cocktails, very food forward.

What was kind of the thinking behind that?

- We wanted to do something that was sort of different than the traditional cocktail bar.

A lot of those sort of traditional bars in New York tend to be more on ,like, the dark and dingy side.

Very- you have to sort of behave yourself and you can't talk too loud.

- Dress a certain way, or look a certain way.

- Exactly.

And so we wanted to do something that kind of opposed to that.

- For sure.

And we wanted, think of Sama Street too, as like your own living room, like a home away from home.

You can come here, feel comfortable, relax, and just enjoy.

Have a good time.

Meet some new friends.

- [Rishi] For us, Asian ingredients are so unique and incredible.

And so flavorsome.

And growing up there was not, as Avi said, there was not much of a cocktail culture in India or in Asia that we saw.

And where they utilize ingredients such as fish sauce, or pandan, or saffron, or dill in a cocktail.

And I think that when people generally think about fish sauce, they think about an Asian salad or in a dressing, but never in a cocktail where you can use turmeric, dill, fish sauce, galangal, pandan.

So you wanna end- since the flavors are so beautiful that it can really shine in the cocktail.

(low tempo music) - [Danielle] Next we make creative cocktails with David Musk, their lead mixologist who shares their vision.

- One thing that we always talked about was, you know, you go to the, the newest hot Thai spot.

You go to the newest, cool Indian spot and the food is great, but the cocktails are always kind of, like second hand.

- [William] Yeah.

- And, you're using all these great things on the table, but why aren't you using them behind the bar?

- [David] A lot of people love this one.

It's called "The Mango-lorian".

So we're gonna do gin.

So it's about an ounce and three quarters of gin.

We're using a gin from India.

This is like a saffron liqueur.

So we're just gonna put a little quarter ounce of that in, and fresh-squeezed lemon juice, always.

And then we're gonna use our whey syrup.

So we make this in house: we strain yogurt and then add sugar to it.

And then we're gonna top it off with a little fresh mango puree.

So this is a cardamom bitters that we like to use, gives it that nice little spice.

And then just a little bit of foamer.

Just so it looks pretty.

(cocktail shaker clangs) - [William] Wow.

- [David] So bright, so beautiful.

And then we're gonna top it off, if you want to grab some of that saffron, just put a little bit on the middle.

- [William] Oh, wow!

- [David] Perfect.

- [Danielle] Cheers!

Ganbei!

Kanpai!

Parai ho!

HipaHipa!

No matter what language you toast in, sharing a drink means toasting to historical, cultural, and spiritual bonds.

When we drink and share our culture, our cup and hearts are full.

(upbeat, fast music)