About
Sugar Moon
Syrups

Our Story

Sugar Moon Syrups was born out of the combined culinary and bar passions of owner and operator Paige Alvarez. Obsessed with all things edible, she attended Johnson & Wales University, where she received her Bachelors in Culinary Arts and Food Service Management with a focus in Beverage Management. With that same vigor and devotion Paige had always had for food, she studied wine, coffee, tea, and mixology in depth. After working in countless kitchens, from pizza-maker to sous chef, she eventually found herself shifting to the front of house. Coffee shops. Wine bars. Then her eventual home in the rum world at Daydream Rum Bar.  

  

As Paige plunged into craft cocktail culture, 2020’s global pandemic appeared as an uninvited guest and changed everything. This included bar culture. Suddenly, capacity had a strict limit, and small businesses struggled to uphold the same quality of service with an abbreviated staff. Paige stepped into the role of General Manager. Between bartending, management, and making all ingredients from scratch, the work was grueling. There were many days, punctuated by peeling, squeezing, and boiling, that Paige wished there was a product of comparable quality that could simply be bought, to relieve just one burden. None measured up – and yes, that is a bartending pun.  

What We Stand For

Mocktail Syrups
Fresh Ingredients
Responsibly Sourced
Passionately Created

A New Opportunity

Perhaps fortuitously, if unfortunately, Daydream was forced to temporarily close. As they waited to reopen, Paige suddenly found herself with nothing but time on her hands. Now she could attempt to solve that problem that plagued her: a high-quality bar product available for purchase. Always experimenting and testing, Paige sought to make traditional recipes indistinguishable from their fresh scratch-made counterparts. She graduated from the Food Business Training program offered by Three Sisters Kitchen, a local New Mexico non-profit, and learned how to produce a shelf-stable, manufactured product. A real product. 

  

After a lot of hard work, recipe development, certifications, support, and a dollop of existential dread, Sugar Moon Syrups bloomed into being. Paige puts strong focus on fostering relationships with the local community, and nothing is of more value than local, responsibly sourced products and the people that make them possible. All of this is obvious in her recipes and her brand. Now, a few years later, she has achieved her goal: to make craft-cocktailing more accessible to both the home bartender and to bars who may not have the space or capacity to make their ingredients from scratch. She’d say she’s pretty proud of herself, if you could get her to admit to it.