After Devastating Crash, Co-Founder of Cooperative Distiller Still Working to Bring Caribbean-Style Rum and Aspirational Practices to Chicago

[Erik Owens]

“We’ve been friends since 2015 and the two things that really hit off our friendship were obviously booze and drinking really fun liquor and experimenting with cocktails, and also talking about politics,” Hussey said. “We were really interested in each other’s politics and our political activism and wanted to infuse that passion into whatever we do.”

That activism is also a reaction to the industry in which they now work.

“The rum and sugar production history, there’s a really bad history of not just bad labor practices but slavery, right? In the Americas and the new world in general. This is our attempt at doing something to address that really terrible, awful history,” Regueira said. “Chicago is historically a labor town. You have in the DNA of our city, you have Haymarket which was the birth of the modern labor movement, right? So Chicago plays a really important role in that … So we wanted to pay homage to Chicago and acknowledge the terrible history of sugar production and rum, but also try to do something about it.”

Erica Gunderson – 12/14/2023 – News WTTW

https://news.wttw.com/2023/12/14/after-devastating-crash-co-founder-cooperative-distiller-still-working-bring-caribbean