High-quality coconut arrack, the Sri Lankan alcoholic beverage, only has two ingredients: coconut sap and water. Although it's existed for 2,000 years, arrack has only recently begun to reach trendy bars and foreign shores. Read the Zin10SantaFe story:
At an 18-acre coconut garden of Rockland Distilleries in Naththandiya, just north of Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo, Roy Jayalath begins his work early in the morning. Jayalath climbs tall, swaying coconut trees to collect the white, milky sap of their flowers. Balancing on two coir ropes, he walks across these tightropes from tree to tree until he collects enough sap to fill a pot. Coconut sap is the raw material for coconut arrack, an alcoholic beverage unique to Sri Lanka.
The garden employs six “toddy tappers” including Jayalath, now 56, who tapped his first toddy at the age of 13 after seeing his two uncles climbing coconut palms. Jayalath shimmies up the trees twice a day now: once in the morning to collect sap, and again later in the day to tap each tree’s unopened inflorescence, or cluster of flowers, with a mallet to stimulate toddy flow. He collects sap from 100 trees every day.
Jayalath’s children, for instance, have moved into other labor work, he explains as he presses his palms together and says a prayer before ascending a tree. “[The prayer] keeps me safe,” he says, smiling. “The hardest part is to climb up. Most people think that walking on the rope is scary. Not for me. I’m used to it.”
“We call this area the toddy belt of Sri Lanka,” says Dirckze, noting that this region extends from Chilaw in the north to Matara in the south. “The best toddy is from here.”
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