Meet the Coa: The Tool Behind Every Harvest

The coa is a long-handled blade traditionally used to strip the spiked leaves from an agave plant and cut the piña free from its roots. A design that's barely changed in generations because it doesn't need to.

Harvesting by hand with a coa means every plant is assessed individually, cut when it's ready, not on a schedule. It's slower than mechanical harvesting and there's no version of this process that speeds it up without losing that judgement.

It's manual, physical work done in the field under the Queensland sun, and it's the very first step in a process that ends, months later, in a glass.