Winner of the 2023 Good Food Award
We’re thrilled to announce that our Cactus Spirit has won the 2023 Good Food Award! It’s an incredible honor - the Good Food Award is one of the most coveted awards in the country for recognizing quality and taste, but also sustainability and environmental stewardship. This win recognizes Dry Land Distillers’ mission to make products with a purpose - using ingredients that are appropriate and sustainable to the American West. It’s a testament to the work it takes to create spirits that are both responsibly produced and incredibly delicious.
Creating an Original Cactus Spirit
Dry Land Cactus is a unique spirit distilled from prickly pear cactus that is native to lands throughout the western US. The cactus is smoked over a mesquite fire for 48 hours to merge the rich, earthy notes of the cactus with the complex bitterness of wood smoke. Fermented with champagne yeast, balanced with fresh cactus fruit and raw cane sugar, Dry Land distills with pure Colorado water from a protected native watershed. The mezcal-like spirit is bottled both as a silver spirit and barreled to produce a limited-release Cactus Reposado and Cactus Añejo spirits.
The Good Food Awards is an annual competition for outstanding American craft food producers and the farmers and suppliers who provide the ingredients. The GFAs celebrate foods that are "tasty, authentic, and responsibly produced," and the companies who push their industries towards craftsmanship and sustainability while enhancing our agricultural landscape and building strong communities.
Dry Land's Commitment to Sustainability
The Good Food Awards win is very meaningful to Dry Land. We’ve been focused on sustainability, crafting spirits from ingredients that are appropriate to the place we live, and supporting small farmers throughout the state by helping them grow heirloom and heritage grains. Our goal is clear - to produce spirits that are authentic to the American West while helping to repair and improve our land, water and communities. We’re the leading distillery in the country that focuses on ancient and heritage grains. While it isn’t easy to work with ancient grains, they are well worth the investment. The spirits are delicious and sustainable.
Gold Medal 2023 Denver International Spirits Competition
Also worth noting, our Cactus Spirit took the Gold Medal at the Denver International Spirits Competition the same week! The Denver International Spirits Competition is the largest spirits competition in the Rocky Mountain region, and is conducted double-blind by a seasoned panel of sommeliers, retail buyers, journalists, mixologists, and beverage directors.
These aren’t the only awards we’ve won for our Cactus spirit over the years. We began winning awards for our Cactus Spirit shortly after we opened in 2018 with a bronze medal for the Cactus Spirit at the London International Spirits Competition.
About the Good Food Awards
The Good Food Foundation exists to celebrate, connect, empower and leverage the passionate and engaged, yet often overlooked, players in the food system who are driving towards tasty, authentic and responsible food in order to humanize and reform our American food culture.
The Good Food Foundation hosts the Good Food Awards every year. The awards recognize products and companies that use responsible practices in their production while producing foods with superior taste. The Good Food Awards recognizes that truly good food – the kind that brings people together and builds strong, healthy communities – contains all of these ingredients. For more information and a list of 2023 winners, visit https://goodfoodfdn.org/awards/.
