Take one look at the social media presence of murr-ma distilling co. and you’re bound to start questioning whether it’s meant to be promoting an art project or a distillery.
For Rabib Rafiq, CEO and co-founder of murr-ma, it’s all of the above — but also none of them — all at the same time.
“What I work to do is to clear any preconceived notions,” Rafiq said, standing in his echoey space in the Keystone Mill building on Pleasant Street on a recent Tuesday afternoon. “It’s almost to put a vague understanding in people’s minds … I like to confuse people by saying we’re a ‘spirited arts project.’”
Despite all of the smoke and mirrors, murr-ma is a distillery making small-batch “River Valley Vodka” and “Mt. Tom Gin” that was started in 2018 by Rafiq, a bartender by trade, along with his business partner, head distiller and bartender Adam Terry. The distillery is entirely run by the two business partners.
Distilling happens in a 55-gallon silver metal column situated in a dimly lit corner of the distillery. Blue-corn vodka is distilled eight times before being bottled, Rabib said, and the gin took over 50 batches and a year in a tiny pot still to nail down the recipe. On a table right near the distilling column is a gravity bottling mechanism where, in addition to being bottled, the spirits are hand packaged and labeled.
Murr-ma started to distribute its products about a year ago, and since then, the brand has made it into 31 package stores and 38 restaurants and bars across Massachusetts, according to its website. The 750 ml bottles of vodka and gin cost around $26 and $28, respectively.
Rafiq said he tries to explore unorthodox ways to differentiate murr-ma from any other distillery by placing an emphasis on creating art through the brand and its collaborations with local and regional artists. Even the brand’s name, murr-ma, means “to walk along in the water searching for something with your feet” in Wagiman, a near-extinct indigenous Australian language that Rafiq said is spoken by less than 10 people in the world.
Work created with an artist or by the brand is released through its social media pages, along with an accompanying poem. Of the most recent posts on the distillery’s Instagram, one photo taken from an old wooden floor depicts a yellow stripe heading past a row of blurry bottles toward a dark blue background with the caption: “river valley vodka/scratches from the past/vestiges of ourselves.”
Some of the art makes it on to the bottles themselves, including that from Easthampton artist Arielle Jessop, whose vibrant yellow, pink and green depictions of the Connecticut River and Mt. Tom adorns each bottle of the distillery’s vodka and gin, respectively.
“It’s important to me for this, or anything else I specifically do, to not just be another thing, but for it to have some kind of meaning for me,” Rafiq said. “And for that, this is my creative outlet.”
And if murr-ma’s unconventional social media presence seems like a marketing strategy, there may be some truth in that. Rafiq said he is committed to the fundamentals of artistic expression — that much is apparent — but both he and Terry have “pretty thorough business backgrounds.”
In addition to owning murr-ma, Rafiq said he is a silent partner at Bistro 63 in Amherst. The two business partners have done market research on what he described as an exploding canned beverage market, adding context to the brand’s plans to create canned cocktails such as hard cherry soda and gin and tonics slated for a 2020 release.
“We’re very intentional with everything we put out, and that doesn’t stop with just the art,” Rafiq said. “It’s also the products.”
Currently, murr-ma is only open on Saturdays from 1 to 6 p.m. People can come during those hours, buy liquor and talk with Rafiq, as he is usually working on distilling. The brand also does events at bars where Rafiq does bartending shifts, in addition to events at the physical distillery space.
Rafiq makes a point to create an atmosphere within the distillery that encapsulates the brand’s intersection with art. On Saturdays the lights are dimmer, candles are lit casting deliberate shadows on blue-green walls, the color of which represents water and mountains, and music like Sibylle Baier’s “Colour Green” blasts through the distillery while people taste the spirits and tour the spot. Every so often, the distillery puts on live musical acts, records some and releases them to be bought on cassette.
“We really try to embody the brand here,” Rafiq said, adding that he personally restores some of the wooden furniture in the distillery. “I think we do a good job with making sure anyone who comes in feels how weird we are, with a combination of visual, audio and presence.”
Ultimately, Rafiq sees his brand expanding past Massachusetts, but says that for now, he’s focused on expanding his brand by talking to community members and introducing them to the company’s products.
“We’re a start-up so we’ve had limited funds for marketing like traditional companies would,” he said. “Anybody who wants to make the time to discover it, we make sure that we are there or someone who knows about us is there to talk.”
Michael Connors can be reached at mconnors@gazettenet.com.