What Is Aguardiente? Colombia's Beloved Guaro

Aguardiente is Colombia's national spirit: a clear, anise-flavored liquor distilled from sugarcane, usually bottled between 24 and 29 percent alcohol. Colombians call it guaro, and it is the shot poured at birthdays, soccer games, funerals, and ordinary Tuesdays. It tastes like sweet black licorice, it is drunk neat in small glasses passed around a table, and almost every region of the country makes its own brand. Here is what it actually is, how it is drunk, and how I came to understand it, mostly the hard way.

Here is the part that still makes me laugh. My parents are Colombian. They sent me to Colombia nearly every summer as a kid. And I still had my first shot of aguardiente in New York City.

My first shot was in Queens, not Colombia

I was born in the States and grew up in New York City. My family is Colombian, but the summers I spent visiting them down there were a childhood thing, and I was far too young to be drinking. Back home in New York, aguardiente was not something I ever saw in the house. It simply was not part of how my family lived day to day in the city.

That changed when I came of age and went into kitchens. I spent my cooking years surrounded by people from all over Latin America, South and Central America both, and the restaurant world runs on shared shifts and shared drinks after them. I grew up in Queens, which I have always considered home even after I moved to Brooklyn as an adult. And in Queens there was Jackson Heights, the neighborhood everyone called Little Colombia.

By the time I was working in restaurants, Jackson Heights had become more Mexican than Colombian, and plenty of my coworkers came from there. We started spending time in the neighborhood, eating the food I had grown up around, the bandeja paisa and the rest of it, and drinking in its bars. That is where someone first put a small plastic cup of aguardiente in front of me. My first taste of my parents' national drink came not in Medellín or Bogotá, but a subway ride from my apartment, in a bar in Queens.

The trip that showed me it was the national drink

The drink did not really land for me until a trip I took in my twenties, years before I ever decided to spend part of my life going back and forth to Colombia. I went down with my mother, and the plan was Medellín. I wanted to finally see the city everyone in my family talked about.

My cousin in Barranquilla was the one arranging the logistics, and somewhere between her plans and ours the wires crossed. Instead of Medellín, we ended up in the Eje Cafetero, Colombia's coffee region, the cluster of departments where the country's most famous coffee comes from. It is heavily touristy and a magnet for paisas, the people of Antioquia and Medellín, who go there in droves. It is the kind of place where the whole country's drinking culture is on display at once, which made it the strangest and best possible introduction. If you want a sense of how deep that coffee identity runs, even down to what the locals do and don't drink, I wrote about a coffee town that drinks instant coffee after spending real time in that part of the country.

That trip is where I understood aguardiente was not just a drink but the drink. It was at every table, every gathering, every long lunch that turned into a long afternoon, the same tables that ended with strong coffee and a plate of Colombian sweets. It was also where I got drunk on it for the first time, and earned one of the worst hangovers of my life.

I blame the sugar. Traditional aguardiente carries a fair amount of it, and I have always been the kind of drinker who takes the shot and does not bother chasing it with water. Here is the honest part, though: aguardiente is not even that strong. At 24 to 29 percent alcohol it sits well below tequila or whiskey. By the numbers it should not have wrecked me the way it did. I probably just overindulged, the way you do when something sweet goes down easy and the bottle keeps coming back around. But that morning taught me to respect it, and the trip taught me what it meant. Aguardiente is in the birthdays, the fútbol matches, the funerals, the regular nights with nothing to celebrate. It is simply part of life.

So what is aguardiente, exactly?

Aguardiente, at its most basic, is a sugarcane spirit flavored with anise. The name translates literally to "burning water," and versions of it exist across the Spanish-speaking world, but in Colombia the word means one specific thing: the anise-forward, lightly sweet, clear liquor that is made from sugarcane and bottled around 29 percent alcohol.

The flavor is the first thing that surprises people. It tastes like black licorice. If you have ever had Greek ouzo, Italian sambuca, Turkish raki, or French pastis, you already know the family. They are all anise-driven spirits, and aguardiente is Latin America's cousin to them. The anise is sweet and a little medicinal, and how strong it hits depends on the brand. Some are restrained; some taste like a licorice candy that happens to be alcoholic.

This is also why aguardiente confuses people who expect it to be like tequila. It is not. Tequila and mezcal are agave spirits with no anise and a very different earthiness. Aguardiente is cane-based and built entirely around that licorice note. Colombians call it guaro, an affectionate nickname you will hear far more often than the formal word, as in "let's get a bottle of guaro."

Is aguardiente only Colombian?

The word itself is not. "Aguardiente" is a catch-all term used across Spain, Portugal, and much of Latin America for a locally distilled spirit, and what it points to changes by country. In Spain and Portugal it usually means a grape-based eau-de-vie, closer to Italian grappa than to anything Colombian. Several other Latin American countries make their own cane aguardientes, some anise-flavored and some not.

What makes the Colombian version distinct is the combination: a sugarcane base, pronounced anise, a touch of sweetness, and that web of state-owned regional brands behind it. When a Colombian says aguardiente, they are not naming a generic category. They mean guaro, the specific anise spirit that defines a night out from Medellín to the coast. So while the word belongs to half the Spanish-speaking world, the guaro in this article is unmistakably, proudly Colombian. That regional loyalty runs through the food as well, right down to Santander, where the local delicacy is a bag of toasted big-bottomed ants.

How it's made, and why every region has its own

Aguardiente starts as sugarcane, which Colombia grows in abundance, especially in the warm valleys around the Valle del Cauca. The cane juice is fermented so the sugars turn to alcohol, then distilled into a clear, neutral spirit, and finally flavored with anise. That is the whole shape of it: cane, ferment, distill, flavor.

What makes Colombian aguardiente genuinely unusual is not the recipe, it is who owns it. Under Colombia's liquor laws, the production of distilled liquor is a government monopoly held by the departments, Colombia's equivalent of states. Article 336 of the Constitution even spells out that the money this monopoly generates is meant to go first toward health and education. Your shot of guaro is, in a real sense, paying for hospitals and schools.

Because the monopoly is departmental, the country ended up with a map of regional brands, each with its own state distillery and its own fierce loyalty. Antioquia makes the famous Aguardiente Antioqueño through its Fábrica de Licores. Cundinamarca, the department around Bogotá, makes Néctar. The Valle del Cauca makes Blanco del Valle. Tolima makes Tapa Roja, the same guaro that shows up at the parties where you will also find a tray of Tolima's rice-stuffed roast pig. Ask a Colombian which aguardiente is best and you are really asking where they are from. It is a point of pride, not just taste.

For most of the country's history that map was rigid. You mostly drank what your own department made, because the rules effectively kept the other brands out. In recent years Colombian courts have started loosening the monopoly, letting the departmental brands compete with one another across the country, so a paisa label can now chase drinkers far beyond Antioquia. The regional loyalty, for what it is worth, has not budged.

There is one more modern wrinkle, and it connects straight back to my hangover. Most of the big brands now sell a "sin azúcar," or sugar-free, version, and in many places it has overtaken the original. The sugar-free guaro exists largely because of the reputation traditional aguardiente earned, the one I experienced firsthand, for the rough next morning that drinkers blame on all that sugar. Whether the sugar is truly the culprit is hard to prove, but the market clearly voted, and the sin azúcar bottle is now the default for a lot of younger Colombians.

How Colombians actually drink it

Aguardiente is drunk neat. No ice in the glass, no mixer, no lime and salt ritual borrowed from tequila. It comes in small straight-sided shot glasses, often served room temperature or lightly chilled, and the bottle sits in the middle of the table where everyone can reach it.

The rhythm is communal and slow despite the format. People pour rounds, toast with a quick "salud," knock the shot back, and set the glass down to talk until the next pour. A single bottle can carry a whole table through an afternoon. It is less about getting drunk fast, though that certainly happens, and more about keeping the table together. The drink is the excuse to stay seated, to keep the conversation going, to not be the one who leaves early.

There are small, unspoken customs around it too. The bottle is shared rather than poured just for yourself, someone almost always appoints themselves to keep the glasses filled, and waving off the rounds entirely can read as declining the company, not just the liquor. You do not have to drink fast, and plenty of people nurse a single shot for a long while, but stepping fully out of the rotation is a quiet way of saying you are ready to leave.

That communal rhythm is the part I actually love, and the part that has nothing to do with the alcohol. The shot is just the thing that keeps everyone at the table.

What it still means to me

I should be honest about where I stand with it now. These days I barely drink, and a bottle of guaro is not something I reach for the way I once did. The hangover from that coffee-region trip feels like a long time ago, and so does the version of me who would close down a bar in Jackson Heights after a double shift.

But I still understand exactly why the bottle comes out. Aguardiente was never really about the buzz. It was about the table it lands on, the people pouring it, and the fact that nobody at that table is in a hurry to leave. That is the part of it I kept, long after I put the shot glass down. When I see a row of those bottles on a supermarket shelf in Colombia now, I do not think about getting drunk. I think about every long afternoon I have spent on the other side of that pour.