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Picture a witch’s kitchen, the kind Hayao Miyazaki drew for us in Kiki’s Delivery Service, where Kiki, in an apron, runs a one-person business with only a black cat for company, ferrying goods from place to place on a broom she never quite trusts. She is self-sufficient, unsupervised and learning by doing.

This was my first thought when I met Kristina, the young Armenian food chemist behind Arax, a small-batch craft beverage brand. There had to be a cauldron, herbs and cats. Funnily enough, all of these exist in Kristina’s life. At the center of it all is this petite woman, spending eight hours over a steaming pot, usually working entirely alone. She refuses shortcuts, preferring slow extraction, fermentation and patience over technologies that would simply speed production.

Kristina’s path to what she reluctantly calls “lemonade,” for lack of a better word, ran through a vermouth bar, where she gradually realized she didn’t actually enjoy alcohol itself. What fascinated her were the smells and the flavors. She began wondering whether they could exist entirely apart from alcohol.

The reluctance to call her drinks lemonade is instructive. Arax is closer to a tea-based botanical drink, whose complexity owes more to wine or vermouth than to something you’d typically find in the soft drinks aisle. Every bottle begins with green, black, red, or smoked tea. The fruits aren’t sweetened; instead they’re lacto-fermented, roasted, salted, baked, or caramelized, whatever each ingredient needs to reveal its fullest character. The label might read “Cherry, Violet, Jasmine,” but behind those three words lies a far more elaborate aromatic composition. Kristina designs every beverage as what she calls a “flavor staircase.” The first sip should be immediately recognizable. Then another aroma quietly unfolds. Finally, an oil-rich ingredient leaves a lingering aftertaste that stays long after the drink is gone.

There is something slightly paradoxical about Kristina’s practice. She speaks the language of food chemistry and can tell you, based on empirical facts, why raspberry should never be boiled if you want the taste of raspberry rather than the taste of raspberry jam, and why coffee and tomato, which share several of the same volatile compounds, taste obviously right together despite sounding obviously wrong. At the same time, Kristina largely describes her work by referring to embodied experience: “My nose is my main instrument.” When she catches a cold and loses her sense of smell, she can barely work. Every bottle takes three days to produce. 

Nothing is artificially colored or flavored. “To spend three days making a beverage from natural ingredients and then add flavoring at the end would be sacrilege,” she says.

The laboratory is contemporary, but the work still depends on observation, trust in nature, patience, and senses trained over years of practice. Kristina described her first wine tastings with considerable humor. Everyone around her confidently discussed something like “notes of oak” in a wine, while she had no idea what they were talking about. For a while she simply pretended to understand. Then she discovered that smell can actually be trained. Today, Kristina keeps a notebook of aromas and periodically tests herself, finding that she recognizes more and more subtle scents every month. To me, whose own wine-tasting abilities remain distinctly mediocre, this was an encouraging revelation.

Female Knowledge

If studying chemistry was Kristina’s own choice, the context for her passion is broader. She sources roughly ninety percent of her ingredients from Armenia. Some come from trusted vendors at Yerevan’s markets; others she gathers herself while hiking near Dilijan or Jrvezh, collecting herbs, pinecones, and wild plants. But the most important part of her supply chain begins in her grandmother’s garden in Yeghegnadzor.

When Kristina first mentioned that she had started making lemonades, her grandmother casually replied that she had dried roses, blackcurrant leaves, raspberry leaves, and lavender stored in the cellar, like “any proper Armenian grandmother would.” Kristina went down, filled several bags, and quietly left cash where it would be seen before driving back to Yerevan. Later, her grandmother called to complain about the money. Kristina is convinced she did the right thing. Care is labor, and labor should be acknowledged.

That exchange marked the beginning of a wider network. Every August, Kristina drives through villages in Vayots Dzor, stopping at the homes of elderly women and men who still keep gardens, even though their children and grandchildren have long since left. If cherries hang unpicked from a tree or herbs dry beneath a roof, she buys what would otherwise go unused, and later returns with bottles of finished lemonade for everyone to taste. The transactions are small, but they affirm that the work of tending gardens, drying herbs, preserving fruit, and knowing what grows where has real value.

Watching this, I found myself thinking, not too literally, about Silvia Federici’s book Caliban and the Witch. Federici writes about forms of women’s knowledge: of the body, of herbs, of fertility, and of healing. During the early modern witch hunts, this knowledge was largely destroyed or rendered invisible, confined to the household or absorbed into formal institutions of expertise.

Kristina studies food chemistry, yet also draws on knowledge inherited from generations of women who came before her. In Kristina, these two forms of knowledge don’t compete; they reinforce one another. Arax is named after Kristina’s mother, who “makes everything from kombucha to wine.” Naming the brand after her feels like a small but important act of attribution. Behind every bottle stands not just a lone chemist, but knowledge accumulated over decades, knowledge that was rarely called “food chemistry,” despite always being exactly that.

Epilogue

Kristina is a multitasker. She sterilizes the bottles, prepares the base, carbonates, fills, labels and packs every bottle herself. Every stage remains under her control, within her small laboratory. She drives across Armenia, smelling herbs, tasting fruit, and collecting ingredients one season at a time.

Whether the result is a basic cucumber lemonade, a floral blend of jasmine and lavender, or an experimental batch inspired by basturma spices, every bottle carries the imprint of one person’s attention. Arax is a cauldron where chemistry, memory, and curiosity are bottled together. Whatever name one chooses for these drinks—lemonades, botanical beverages, or perhaps potions—they are unmistakably Kristina’s own creation. Fortunately, women with such skills today are praised rather than hunted down.

Go on a journey through Armenia’s landscapes and kitchens, its memories and quiet rituals in this month’s issue of SALT. From vegan dining and forgotten recipes to hiking trails and nostalgic reflections, these stories invite us to slow down and appreciate the unexpected.