Inside The Cocktail Lab Where A World’s 50 Best Bar Rewrites Colombia’s Spirits Story

A nondescript office building high in the hills of Medellín, Colombia seems like a most unexpected place for industry-shaking innovation. Yet hidden behind a mirror-paneled door, its 22nd-floor location making for sweeping city views, Mamba Lab exudes all the excitement and eccentricity of a mad scientist’s laboratory. Mad, in the very best way.

Vibrantly lit and clad in stainless steel and glass, Mamba Lab is filled with high-tech machinery and laboratory-style glassware that looks lifted out of a chemistry experiment, housing little-known liquids, ferments, and spreads made from every herb and spice under the Colombian sun. Designed to turn a passion for cocktails into a science, it’s now beginning to make noise in a way the mixology world can no longer ignore.

Mamba Lab is the newest project from the award-winning team behind Mamba Negra, a bar that made the list of The World’s 50 Best Bars for the first time last year. Though Mamba Negra has helped chart a new course as a leader in Medellín’s growing bar scene since it opened in 2022, its Mamba Lab space and signature eight-course cocktail “tasting menu” debuted less than a year ago, first to industry insiders at Medellín Cocktail Week.

Mamba Negra’s cocktail menu has always prioritized Colombian ingredients, opting for innovative products from local brands like Selva Gin and Ron Carbón whenever possible. But the mini-cocktail tasting menu at Mamba Lab takes the patriotism of Mamba Negra’s pours to the next level. In Mamba Lab, 100% of all the products used in every cocktail are Colombian, from the spirits that form the base of most drinks to the smallest of garnishes.

In a country best known for its aguardiente, crafting a wholly Colombian cocktail menu might seem like a significant challenge. But for Mamba Negra’s founder, Juan David Zapata, it is an opportunity to explore the immense richness of his country and the creative prowess of his team.

“Colombia has nothing to envy when it comes to what we can offer, particularly in the world of drinks,” said Zapata. “Colombia is the second most biodiverse country in the world, and that gives us a lot to work with when it comes to ingredients for creating a cocktail menu.”

Zapata’s commitment to using all Colombian ingredients to riff on some of the world’s most classic cocktails makes the Mamba Lab space within Mamba Negra more than just an interesting design choice, but a true necessity. Though bartenders use the space to host cocktail tasting experiences, Mamba Lab is a true, functioning lab space equipted to prepare the countless components that make up the bar’s menu.

Innovation is the name of the game when you can’t fall back on spirits used the world over. In Mamba Lab, bartenders have crafted their own Colombian-made version of a vermouth rosso, derived from more than 35 herbs native to the Colombian Andes. One cocktail on the Mamba Lab menu uses wine made from local purple yams to replace crème de cassis. Another replicates the spice of a Bloody Mary with a distillate the team creates from the ají ojo de pez pepper native to the Amazon Rainforest.

To convert a back room in Mamba Negra into a full-blown laboratory was no small feat, but it felt like an important step for Zapata as he sought to bring his full vision for the experience to life. Mamba Lab took around nine months to construct from start to finish, while the menu of eight mini cocktails took nearly seven months to finalize. Zapata conceptualized the menu as a journey across Colombia, with each of the eight drinks inspired by a mineral derived from Colombia and the region in which that mineral is found.

While the Mamba Negra team makes many of the ingredients for their cocktails in house, they have also prioritized working with local producers to source spirits that have long been produced across Colombia. Despite their centuries-long history, Colombian spirits like tapetusa, chapil, and ñeque have long been underrated, dismissed and even criminalized.

Among these spirits is viche, a sugarcane distillate traditional made in Afro-Colombian communities on the country’s Pacific coast. Though spirits like viche are making a resurgence in Colombia amid a complex web of shifting laws surrounding their commercialization, their widespread use across the country remains rare. Zapata wants the Mamba Lab experience to be a part of changing that.

“Colombia has always looked outwards for our cocktail inspiration,” said Zapata. “We don’t have to, and with Mamba Lab we try to show that. It’s a point of pride to be able to create this high-level mixology experience that is on par with the best you’ll find anywhere in the world, done our way and with our products.”

Zapata’s commitment is one he shares with his team. “After conceptualizing the menu, I wanted my team to create each of the individual drinks on the Mamba Lab menu because I thought it was really important that they have ownership over the experience, too,” he said.

Though the bartenders across the Mamba Negra team practice guiding cocktail tasting experiences in the Mamba Lab space, Lala Arrieta and Diego “Mapache” Miranda help lead the experience. Arrieta created Mamba Lab’s only mocktail, inspired by a classic rum old fashioned and the metallic coltan found in Colombian’s eastern llano. Mapache’s cocktail was inspired by the Kir Royale and the rich red color of the garnets that emerge from the region of La Guajira.

Arrieta and Mapache both recently accompanied Zapata on an extended trip to Italy for multiple guest bartending sessions, one of Mamba Negra’s efforts to bring the Mamba Lab experience to leading bars around the world.

The immense pride Zapata and the Mamba Negra team exude for what they’ve created in Mamba Lab speaks not only to the immense growth of mixology innovation across the country, but to the resiliency of Colombia itself.

It is one that is intimately alive in Zapata’s own personal story. He born and raised in Medellín’s Comuna 13, once the most dangerous neighborhood in what was, for a time, the world’s most dangerous city. Now, Zapata has his hands in some of the country’s most inspiring cocktail projects.

In addition to leading Mamba Negra, his beverage company Juniper Drinks exports its products to nearly a dozen countries, his new salsa bar Quema Que Quema has become one of Medellín’s top nightlife spots, and he’s even a partner in Colombian-produced Selva Gin.

As it approaches its one-year anniversary, Mamba Lab is set to debut a brand new menu, this time inspired by Colombia’s flowers, at the upcoming Medellín Cocktail Week. Slated for the first week of June, the five-day festival that Zapata spearheaded last year will welcome guest bartenders from more than 50 of the world’s top bars. Among them is Bar Leone from Hong Kong, which was named The World’s Best Bar in October.

Welcoming such a star-studded lineup behind the bars at Mamba Negra and other top venues in Medellín means more to Zapata than just the opportunity to show off his latest work. For him, it’s an opportunity to showcase what he has championed with Mamba Lab all along: that Colombia has nothing to envy of anywhere else in the world, especially when it comes to cocktails.