Drink Your Quinoa: Quri Vodka Distills Incan ‘Gold’ In Peru

The story of Jonathan Tourgee’s path from chemical engineer to CEO of a craft vodka startup is about love, entrepreneurship and the choices we make. And, not incidentally, it’s also about quinoa, the high-protein seed revered by the Inca civilization and now distilled by Tourgee into Quri Vodka, sold in a classy gold and black bottle.

The tale starts around 2013, when Tourgee, bored with his corporate job, began brewing beer in his parent’s Baltimore garage. In 2014, he bought his own still to make spirits. In the beginning, it was all just a welcome diversion. But that year, Tourgee went to Rio de Janeiro with friends to soak up the excitement of the 2014 World Cup. Everything would soon change for him.

During a side trip to Buzios, a stylish Brazilian beach town, he met Shirley Alencastre Melgarejo, a Peruvian woman, at the hostel where he and his friends were staying. After their first kiss, he was pretty sure Shirley was the one. For a while, they did the whole long-distance-relationship thing, traveling back and forth between Baltimore and Lima.

Tourgee eventually quit his high-paying engineering gig in the spring of 2016 to move to Peru and take a shot at love and business.

Tourgee knew he wanted to distill vodka, but he didn’t initially settle on quinoa. He experimented with some 300 different fermentable plants in the tiny Lima apartment they shared with Shirley’s two sisters and one of their boyfriends.

“They would go off to work, and I’d start mashing and cooking.” Jonathan recalls. He spent his days fermenting in the bedroom and distilling the product on the rooftop. “All night long, you’d hear the bubbling,” he says.

”I wanted to make something distinctly Peruvian,” he adds. “Quinoa just wound up being a winner. It made the best vodka I ever had.”

Quri Vodka is distilled in Lima in 45-gallon batches, using locally grown quinoa from a small family farm near Lake Titicaca. The name Quri means gold in the Quechua language, reflecting both the color of the seed and its value to the Incan civilization as a key nutrient, says Tourgee.

The premium brand, which officially launched in December after some Covid-related delays, sold 15,000 bottles in its first month.. The company sells mostly online in 41 states and in stores and restaurants in southern California, where Tourgee and his wife reside when they’re not in Peru. Jonathan Tourgee is CEO while Shirley Tourgee serves as chief operating officer.

Quri plans to donate 5% of net profits to support the Colorado-based charity Peruvian Hearts, which promotes the education and empowerment of young women in the Peruvian Andes. Although the startup isn’t making a profit at this early stage, Tourgee says the company has already begun donating $300 a month to the organization. It’s also committed to paying a fair price to its one current farmer by eliminating the middleman. A bottle currently costs $34.99 or less, depending on the quantity purchased.

Most Americans who eat quinoa know it as a high-protein, gluten-free superfood. Quri makes no claims about health benefits—it is booze, after all. But quinoa’s familiarity among many southern Californians, as well as the company’s social mission, has helped the product resonate with consumers, Tourgee says. A Google search turned up just one other quinoa vodka maker, the French brand FAIR, which makes organic quinoa vodka in Cognac, France, using Bolivian quinoa and corn liquor, according to its website.

To get the business off the ground, the Tourgees have invested their own funds, as well as raised pre-seed financing, almost $180,000 from 260 investors on an equity crowdfunding platform and another $200,000 in convertible debt. They’re in the process of issuing another convertible note to hopefully generate $300,000 more, and they hope to finalize a seed round from two investors soon, Jonathan Tourgee says. He took part in an online accelerator program to gain valuable business skills, as well.

The startup has already garnered some industry recognition, earning a 92-point rating from NY Spirits Comp and a gold medal at the 2020 China Wine and Spirits Award in Hong Kong. Quri also won silver medals in USA Spirits Ratings, the 2020 New York International Spirits competition and the 2020 Bartender Spirits Awards. But as a tiny player in the $28 billion U.S. vodka market, it still faces many challenges, not the least of which is scaling the business beyond one farmer and one 45-galloon batch at a time without compromising quality or authenticity. In five years, Tourgee says he expects to achieve national distribution, selling more than 100,000 cases a year.

Quri’s process starts with hand-milling the quinoa, which is mashed, then fermented with five different strands of yeast. “We use two champagne yeasts and two white-wine yeasts, and a traditional vodka yeast strain,” explains Tourgee. Each strain of yeast produces a different flavor profile. By using five strains, Quri achieves a larger spectrum of flavors, with no one flavor overwhelming the others, he says. Quri uses water from glacier-fed Lake Titicaca, which is then filtered through reverse osmosis. Their quinoa farmer, Juan and Rosa Limachi, still use an ox-drawn wooden plow, and sow the seeds by hand. wooden ox-drawn plow.

Quri distills the product three times, twice in a traditional pot still and the third time in a 16-foot tall vodka column, in order to achieve the requisite 95% purity.

“Our vodka has a lot more flavor than most vodkas,” Tourgee says. He prefers drinking it in a vodka martini. “I like to say if you’re going to add a lot of sugary products you won’t taste it. Buy a cheaper vodka.”