In gin, it's the peel that carries the aroma—not the juice.
That's why every botanical we use is grown organically.
Peace of mind is part of the pleasure.

Cambodian pepper, often compared to Bordeaux wine for its aroma.
Fresh from Kampot, dried from Mondulkiri.
We’ve built a system to always secure finest grade harvests, direct from the source.

For all botanicals except pepper, our distillers go to the market themselves.
They choose with their eyes and hands, carefully selecting what’s freshest that day.
Because we work with raw ingredients, timing is everything.

Knives, peelers, cleavers, mortars... and fingertips.
To preserve the delicate flavor of fresh ingredients, no machines are used.
We listen to the voice of each botanical—and find the right approach for every one.

MAWSIM’s signature: using fresh botanicals—never dried. But this choice makes recipe control delicate. Fresh ingredients hold varying amounts of water, so relying on measured weight alone can’t guarantee flavor consistency.
Our micro-distillery houses 200L and 60L stills. While low in output, they allow for precise adjustments with every batch, capturing the subtle shifts in each harvest.

In distillation, cutting the hearts—the prime portion of the run—is key. Each botanical hits its flavor peak at a different moment, and fresh ingredients often carry harsh notes in the tails.
At MAWSIM, we cut the hearts earlier than usual. The yield is smaller, but the aroma is richer, fresher, and lingers longer. We sacrifice volume for uncompromising quality.

Rather than discarding the tails—the last part of the distillate—we blend them into the base spirit of the next batch. This minimizes the flavor variation often seen in one-shot distillation, helping us maintain a consistent profile across batches. It also means less waste and fewer raw materials used.

Glossary
Heads – the first distillate; also called the foreshot.
Hearts – the main spirit cut; used as the final product.
Tails – the final distillate; also called feints, with lower alcohol and heavier notes.

The two syrups developed for MAWSIM GIN are crafted from unused botanical parts—such as citrus pulp—and surplus materials. We also repurpose distillate not used in the gin itself—heads and tails—as sanitizing alcohol, and breathe new life into spent botanicals like pepper and juniper by serving them as bar snacks, realizing a synthesis of high-quality product development and sustainability. At MAWSIM Bar in Phnom Penh, even cardamom pods find a second purpose—smoked into Negronis as flavor chips.

Our bottles are made from color-shifted glass—difficult to recycle and typically discarded. The unique gradation, fading from bright green to deep blue, makes every bottle one of a kind. They are quality-controlled for second life—as carafes, vases, or vessels of one’s choosing.
Once brought from distant lands, gin bottles were later rediscovered by Japanese tea masters—who gave them new life as cherished flower vases. In Japan, that legacy of reuse lives on. MAWSIM bottles, too, are crafted with that same spirit of beauty and purpose—designed to transcend their first role.

In Tonle Sap, the largest lake in Southeast Asia, water hyacinth—an invasive alien species notorious as one of the world’s worst—is growing out of control. Familiar in Japan as the floating plant often seen in goldfish bowls, this aquatic plant is in fact native to South America. It can multiply up to two million times in just seven months, and has naturalized across tropical and temperate regions worldwide. The effort to control its spread by turning it into bioethanol—while restoring the lake’s biodiversity and water quality, and exploring energy sources that don’t compete with food—became the origin of MAWSIM.

Sunwaspa Inc., the company behind MAWSIM, has been collecting wastepaper in Gifu for over half a century. In recent years, it has also launched pilot projects to produce bioethanol from non-recyclable paper waste. The company’s bioethanol is made by saccharifying and fermenting cellulose—the structural component of plant cell walls—unlike conventional grain-based ethanol, and it does not compete with food sources. What’s more, it can be made from virtually any kind of plant matter—including green waste. Yes, even water hyacinth.

Turning an endlessly multiplying noxious plant into carbon-neutral energy—we never imagined it would become gin.

But the fundamental challenge of cellulosic ethanol soon revealed itself: it could not be made commercially viable without sustained support from the public sector.

So the company set out to redesign the business model itself, in hopes of finding a path forward. That meant producing bioethanol from the water hyacinth—a tropical menace—and exploring ways to use it as boat fuel for floating communities. The idea was to envision a future where decentralized energy could thrive, and to build a viable business that could keep that vision alive. That’s how the ethanol ended up as a beverage—becoming the base spirit for gin.

After all, beverage alcohol is ethanol. And since it’s made by fermenting biomass—rice, grapes, and the like—every alcoholic drink in history is, technically speaking, a form of bioethanol. In fact, the chemical reaction that takes place when you drink ethanol is exactly the same as when you burn it. So maybe getting drunk and staying still is actually better for the planet. MAWSIM is our serious answer to that seemingly ridiculous question.