Photo by Eliesa Johnson
Marco Zappia, Dustin Nguyen, and Adam Witherspoon make up the 3LECHE group, currently building out a Food Building space for their mad science.
Marco Zappia, Dustin Nguyen, and Adam Witherspoon make up the 3LECHE group, currently building out a Food Building space for their mad science.
Dirt. You start with dirt. When you’re some of the most talented and innovative bartenders and mixologists in the Cities and your bar program shuts down, stopping all motion and progress, where do you go? “Hanging out in the dirt seemed like probably the move,” Marco Zappia says one morning at his new ingredients/elixir/science lab in the Food Building in Northeast. Zappia, Dustin Nguyen, and Adam Witherspoon were the creative force behind the fermentation program and cocktails at Colita, gaining national attention before the bartending world fell into chaos.
“Getting out of the city was kind of eye-opening,” Zappia notes. “We get stuck in our little city space and forget what the hell is growing out there. For the last 10 years, we’ve been buying botanicals and herbs from farms, but we take it for granted. Farming is hard. I have a new appreciation for the bounty of the Midwest. We do incredible things here that nowhere else can do, like the hazelnut farmers in southeast Minnesota or the sugar beet cooperatives. It’s amazing.”
It was finding these ingredients that led them on their current path, to form a liquids lab called Tres Leches with a mission statement: build around relationships and make dope shit. It’s not about bartending. And it’s not about creating a spirit, or a beer, or any alcohol really.
“We focus on three heroes, which are fermentation, maceration, and distillation,” he says. “We take raw materials, filter them through these techniques, and make, well, an array of different things. We’re trying to create a Midwest pantry with rock star ingredients.”
Look, I don’t even have the page space to really get into all the cool science these guys are using to make things. A friend, Ben Jordan, is a chemical engineer who loves beer and created a whole vacuum distillation tech to remove the alcohol from beer that this crew now uses to extract aroma molecules from different raw materials, creating natural flavorings with essential oils, extracts, and hydrosols.
So that’s it: relationships and dope shit. These flavors and extracts that they’re making are meant for chefs and bartenders to use as a tool kit to make better drinks and dishes. “Doing non-alcoholic things is actually more interesting to me,” Zappia adds. “I like giving the same attention and love to a nonalcoholic program that we give to cocktail menus. If we can reduce drinking by 10 percent, we can significantly reduce all the bad things that happen with drinking. It’s not a zero-sum game if you can have something nice, something delicious.”
While they are quietly providing product to restaurant friends around town and helping with cocktail programs that integrate their flavors, the first thing you’ll be able to buy from Tres Leches will be a fermented botanical beverage. They have five mainstay flavors that they are working on, liquids that incorporate everything from aronia berries and pineapple weed tepache to rhubarb, ginseng, roses—so many layers and yet so clean and easy to sip.
It’s no accident that they landed in the Food Building, where Red Table Meats, Alemar Cheese, and Baker’s Field mill live. This house is an incredible source of by-product that the team uses to create. Are you ready for Minnesota miso? “We get the waste products from the Kernza Baker’s Field is using; I have access to 7,000 liters of Alemar whey every week; we’re hybridizing yeast strains to eat lactose and then make vinegar; we’re working on a wheat germ miso. This building is magic.”
It’s not lost on them that during the pandemic people were drinking more than ever, and they, the makers of such fine alcoholic drinks, stopped. “Everyone was sort of scrambling and surviving,” Zappia notes. “Drinking but not really acting. This was sort of just the catalyst, really. It’s the moment of decision: Who do you want to be? You don’t actually get to ask yourself that if you’re working and surviving, right? Like, you can only ask yourself that if there’s a crossroads. You hold close the partnerships in your life and find a way to bring each other up.”
