Meet The Guatemalan Woman Who's The 'Guardian Angel' Of Zacapa Rum

Lorena Vasquez was the only woman among 200 men at the rum brand. Here's how she earned her success.

In 1979, at the beginning of the Nicaraguan Revolution, Lorena Vásquez moved from her hometown of San Marcos, Nicaragua, to Guatemala with her then-husband. The most difficult thing about embarking on a new life in a new country was leaving her family behind, but she managed to get the most out of it. In September 1984, she started working at Zacapa Rum, in quality control; she was later promoted and became the distillery’s and the country’s first female master blender. In the decades since, more women have become master blenders in a male-dominated industry, but the spirits industry has a long way to go.

Her expertise came from having studied chemistry and food technology in college. While working at Zacapa, she developed their Sistema Solera, in which the rum — made from virgin sugar cane juice, not molasses — is aged in four casks instead of just one at an altitude of 2,300 meters (1.4 miles) above sea level. This allows less oxygen, pressure and temperature to pervade the rum so it can age longer, generating a richer and more complex product. Guatemala isn’t typically known for its rum — parts of the Caribbean are more well-known — but Vásquez and Zacapa have put the country on the map as a purveyor of excellent rum. One initiative Vásquez began was hiring 700 Indigenous Guatemalan women to work from home and weave palm bands (petate), which wrap around the bottles of rum. “It was born out of necessity when the brand was growing to help the people of Guatemala, especially women,” Vásquez told HuffPost. “A little bit of Guatemala is in every bottle of Zacapa.” In this edition of Voices in Food, Vásquez, who refers to herself as a “Guardian Angel” because she oversees the entire process of rum, talks from her home in Guatemala City, Guatemala, about why she became a master blender, representation in the industry and how it was her destiny to work in rum.