Watch Episode 2 of Genius at Work below. By the time you arrive at ARC Gin’s facility in Calamba, the air is already perfumed. Calamansi oils misting faintly over steel tables, pomelo peels piled like gilded crescents, sampaguita, and ilang-ilang resting in shallow trays. It smells less like a factory than a kitchen mid-prep. Exactly as it should. For its founder Matthew Westfall, gin is a kind of “a blank canvas.” Juniper may define the spirit, but the remaining space (he calls it the “10 percent you can play with”) is where identity takes shape. In ARC’s case, that identity is unapologetically Filipino. The idea began not in a bar, but rather in a development career that spanned the Peace Corps, USAID, and more than two decades at the Asian Development Bank (plus a small cameo in Oliver Stone's 1986 anti-war film Platoon). “This is really a development project,” Westfall..
