Not Mexico. Not Agave.

The bottle is the colour of late sunlight. On the front, a painted desert: saguaro in silhouette, cloud stacked and lit gold, a wash of violet along the base. Underneath, in plain type, the only line that matters. Spirit distilled from prickly pear cactus and cane sugar.

Two people made this bottle. One of them distilled the plant. The other painted it.

On Saturday afternoon Dry Land Distillers set a black-draped table on the patio at Bosq, on South Mill Street, and released Cactus Añejo. Red Mountain on one side, Aspen Mountain on the other, brick pedestrian mall in between. Twelve to three, roughly the length of a long lunch.

Dry Land is a small distillery in Longmont, founded in 2017 by Nels Wroe, Aaron Main and Marc Staats on an idea that sounds simple and is not: use what actually grows in Colorado. In practice that has meant heirloom wheats. It has also meant prickly pear.

Cactus is a difficult raw material. It is not grown for spirits, the pads have to be smoked and fermented before they give up anything useful, and the yields are lower than grain. Dry Land smokes the pads over mesquite for around forty-eight hours, which is where the spirit picks up its resemblance to mezcal.

The label is a Simon Bull painting.

Bull is British, has lived in the United States since 2003, and has been official artist to the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, to the 2019 National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, and to Muhammad Ali from 2007 until Ali's death in 2016. He is not a visiting name. Meuse Gallery is his own. He opened the first location in Carmel-by-the-Sea in 2017, a second in St. Helena in 2019, and an Aspen room on South Mill Plaza in late 2023, a few doors from where the bottles were being drawn on.

He painted the label in Arizona, and it shows. Saguaro do not grow in Colorado. They barely grow outside the Sonoran Desert. So the bottle carries a picture of one desert wrapped around a spirit made from another, and both of them were opened at seven thousand nine hundred feet in a town ringed by mountains.

None of which is an error. It is closer to the point. The cactus was on that patio in two states at once, one you could look at and one you could drink, and neither was anywhere near where it came from.

Bull spent most of the afternoon at a small white table by the railing with a marker in his hand and about fifteen bottles stacked in front of him, drawing straight onto the labels. Forty of those exist. They go to Dry Land's tasting room in Longmont, and no two carry the same drawing.

The afternoon was put together by Scott McDowell, who runs the Denver marketing agency Strategic Leverage. He spent his early career booking artists at Akon's label, Konvict Muzik, then moved into sponsorships, work that now includes 303 Magazine, Denver Fashion Week and athlete lounges at the X Games. Aspen is new ground for him. He introduced Bull to the distillery.

The food came from Borde + Kurv, and it was the discovery of the afternoon. Jen Kemp runs it out of Basalt, works almost entirely with Colorado producers, and her husband makes the boards by hand. Two of them ran the length of the table: whipped cheese in terracotta, dried apricots, kiwi cut into stars, jicama, cured meat, marigolds.

In the middle of each, a cactus built from cucumbers, spined with toothpicks, planted in a hollowed pineapple. One wore a small woven sombrero.

By three the light had moved off the patio and people were carrying bottles out onto the mall.

The thing worth saying about the afternoon is that nobody oversold it. A distillery brought a spirit made from a plant most people step around. A painter put a desert on it. Aspen, which is fluent in expensive things, turned out for something that was mostly just well made.