In 1781, a small group of Spanish settlers founded a town in the dry valley north of the Los Angeles River. They called it El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula. To survive there, they had to bring water inland from the river. The earthen channel they dug to do it was called the Zanja Madre — the Mother Ditch. Our bourbon and rye are named after it because, in a real way, Los Angeles exists because of it, and Hollywood Distillery exists because of Los Angeles.
The channel
The Zanja Madre was a hand-dug, gravity-fed irrigation channel that ran from a dam on the Los Angeles River — near what is now Elysian Park — to the heart of the original pueblo, near today's Olvera Street. It was the city's primary water source for more than a hundred years, supplying drinking water, irrigation, and the small-scale agriculture that made survival in the basin possible.
The channel was widened, deepened, and improved repeatedly through the Spanish, Mexican, and early American periods of Los Angeles history. By the late 1800s, the population had grown beyond what an open irrigation ditch could supply, and the city moved to enclosed pipe systems. The Zanja Madre was filled in or paved over by the 1880s.
Why we named the whiskey for it
Hollywood Distillery is in Hollywood, California — a neighborhood within a city that exists, fundamentally, because of one earthen channel dug in the 1780s. Without water, no Los Angeles. Without Los Angeles, no Hollywood. Without Hollywood, no Hollywood Distillery. The Zanja Madre is, in a literal way, the reason we're able to make whiskey here at all.
It's also a name with the right resonance. "Mother ditch" sounds humble, but it's the line that made everything else possible. Whiskey gets named after castles, kings, founders' last names. We thought it was more interesting to name ours after the infrastructure that made the place possible.
The whiskey
Zanja-Madre Bourbon and Rye are both high-rye, California-aged whiskeys distilled in our copper Vendome pot still in Hollywood. The bourbon is rich and balanced; the rye is sharper and spicier. Both are small-batch and bottled by hand.
Where to next
Shop Zanja-Madre Bourbon or Rye, read tasting notes for the bourbon, or learn how bourbon is made.