CARIBBEAN BLUE How a partnership to save Grand Cayman’s endangered blue WRITTEN BY CARRIE DOW iguanas led to an award-winning gin
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“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” — Arthur Dent
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PHOTO BY MARO PRODUCTIONS
istiller Moises Sevilla had already created a few successful spirits for another company before starting his own distillery in George Town, Grand Cayman. Then he got a phone call. “They called me in for a meeting and I thought ‘this is awesome,’” he said with an impish grin as he set up for a tasting in his tiny distillery, Grand Cayman Distillery. “They said, ‘We want to build a product together.’”
He was describing a meeting with the National Trust of the Cayman Islands, a nonprofit, non-governmental organization that protects the islands’ natural resources and historical spaces. One of the organization’s flagship programs is the Blue Iguana Conservation center, a facility created to save the island’s iconic and critically endangered blue iguanas, the only blue iguanas in the world. The meeting would change the course of his nascent distillery. “I was hell-bent on doing a rum because I was already developing a gin,” he explained. “They were like, ‘No, we want a gin.’” When he asked why, they handed him a giant three-ring binder, each page filled with detailed information about all the island botanicals blue iguanas eat. “I started getting really excited,” he said, his grin getting wider.
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Sevilla was born in New Jersey, but his mother moved to Grand Cayman when he was a kid. He attended Seminole State College of Florida and returned to Grand Cayman with a business degree. After chatting for a while, you can pick up a hint of a Jersey accent, especially when he gets enthusiastic about something, like discussing his spirits. He had worked with several Grand Cayman companies over the years doing retail, marketing, and product creation; however, his last employer was a distillery. A distilling hobbyist, he convinced his boss to let him create a few new products on a small unused R&D still. One of those products was a pink gin that the company used to raise money for a local breast cancer organization. He said the gin raised $20,000 in two years and received coverage from local news outlets. That’s how the National Trust found him. Sevilla said he started his own distillery because he knew his former employer wouldn’t allow him to make the spirits he wanted to make in the ways he wanted to make them. He had already created a gin called Zeus when the trust approached. The trust also runs the island’s Queen Elizabeth II Botanical Gardens, where the conservation program is located. They gave Sevilla access to the garden’s plants for three months. W W W . ARTISANSPIRITMAG . C O M