If you’ve never had baijiu, don’t let the squeamishness of a few Westerners discourage you. Better to keep in mind the millions of Chinese whose deeply held affection for the drink has made it the most popular spirit in the world – by a wide margin.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the drink can be an acquired taste, and at least in the US, a difficult sell. No one knows this better than the five siblings who are the proprietors of America’s only baijiu distillery.

“Had we known what we were getting ourselves into ...” says one of the five, Michelle Ly, ruefully, as we speak in the sleek, modern tasting room of the Vinn Distillery bottle shop, in Portland, Oregon. “I think it was a fortunate thing that we were ignorant to how much Americans weren’t ready for baijiu. It was only after we went out and tried to sell it that we realised: ‘Oh my gosh, this is the hardest stuff to sell!’”

Ly doesn’t blame the consumer, either; the problem, she says, is unfamiliarity. It’s not that most people haven’t tried baijiu – though most haven’t – it’s that most have never tasted anything like it.

“When your taste buds aren’t familiar with that flavour profile you just kind of reject it,” says Ly. “With baijiu you have to have an open mind.”

The difference is not just cultural; baijiu is unusual, too, in the way that it’s made. It is one of the rare spirits created through parallel fermentation. Most alcohol is produced in two discrete steps; first a grain is soaked in water, or malted, which converts its starches into sugars, and then it is fermented: the process by which those sugars become alcohol. For millennia, baijiu manufacturers have – in the most basic terms – carried out both processes at once. The grain – for Vinn Distillery and many baijiu distilleries in southern China, that would be rice – is cooked and then combined with the fermentation starter, called the qu, a mix of rice flour and a secret family recipe of herbs and spices. The mixture is left to ferment for six months before being transferred to a pot still, where it will age for at least another year. Parallel fermentation is responsible for baijiu’s funky flavour – and its notoriously high alcohol content, another aspect Americans struggle with.

“For our flagship product, we made one at 80 proof, which is more in line with a vodka, whereas traditionally in China you would drink it at 100 to 120 proof,” says Ly. “We’ve created another product, called the Baijiu Family Reserve, which is 106 proof, more in line with traditional baijiu.”

A bottle of Vinn’s flagship spirit can be bought for less than US$30 but just because it’s affordable and made in America doesn’t mean it’s not authentic.

“We’ve always distilled baijiu in our family,” says Ly. “Baijiu is used in ancestor offerings and in every celebra­tion. When we came to the United States, we still had to honour our ancestors and welcome the New Year. We cooked with it, we made medicine with it. So, we distilled our own baijiu in the backyard. Unbeknown to us, that was illegal.

“We thought it was OK because it was our tradition. It’s what we’d always done.”

The Ly family has been making baijiu for at least six generations. For as long as anyone can remember, their ancestors were known as master distillers, much appreciated in the village near Ha Long Bay, in northern Vietnam, in which the five siblings now running the Vinn Distillery were born.

“As children, we all knew the steps of the distilling pro­cess. Whenever they made rice for fermenting, we would help add the qu and stick it into little buckets. And we’d have to tend the fire for the still,” Ly recalls. “We’d do these little bits and pieces, we never did the whole process.”

In 1978, when the siblings were still very young, their world turned upside down. Caught up in a wave of deportations of ethnic Chinese, the Lys were sent to a village in China’s Guangdong province, which Michelle Ly identifies as Boluo.

“It was an orange-farming village,” she says. “It was a community where the people who worked in the field would come back to warm cooked food in a cafeteria-like facility. It wasn’t bad living at all. There was definitely a strong sense of community.”

The family may have been there to this day if it weren’t for the skills of the siblings’ father, Phan Ly.

“Someone saw our dad and noticed his complexion and asked, ‘Why are you so dark?’ And he told them he was a skipper on a fishing boat in Vietnam.” Other villagers, eager to leave impoverished China, enlisted him as captain in a daring escape bid.

“The village pooled their money and bought a little fish­ing boat – our ticket on the ship was our dad’s sailing skills; we had no money – and we sailed the seas for 57 days.”

That voyage ended in Hong Kong, where they were housed near Kai Tak airport in “a room on the 4th floor for our family of seven for one month. Food, water and tea were provided three times a day. We were not allowed to leave that [building] during that month. After a month, we moved to another refugee camp, where we were allowed to roam the city to look for jobs,” says Ly.

“We shared a room with two other families. There were queen and twin bunk beds that were stacked three beds high. Because we didn’t know any better, we felt like that was normal. We had shared bathrooms and we had a portable stove for cooking on the balcony.”

The Lys didn’t have to wait in Hong Kong for as long as many other refugees at the time, the size of the family catching the attention of a small church in Oregon, in America’s Pacific northwest.

“They asked our dad where he wanted to go and he said anywhere but back to China,” says Ly. “Then, in 1979, a tiny United Methodist church in Wilsonville, about 20 miles [32km] south of Portland, took our family. We were so lucky.

“We landed here in Portland in November 1979, I had just turned seven. My sister Vicki had just turned five. None of us spoke English. I only knew A, B and C. The community acclimated us to society. They taught us words like ‘floor’ and ‘ceiling’ and ‘door’. They taught us how to use the stove, they taught us how bathrooms and toilets and showers worked. It was all so foreign to us.”

Like so many other Chinese immigrants, the Lys began to make a living in the restaurant business. All along their father distilled baijiu.

“As a kid, we had to drink alcohol. [Their parents] would only give us a small amount, not enough to get buzzed or drunk; just enough to make our ‘blood flow better’. They weren’t picky about what we drank, we just had to drink alcohol. It tasted awful to us so we would cry when we did have to drink it,” Ly recalls. “But as we got older, we learned to appreciate it.”

The restaurant, Wok Inn, in Wilsonville, was a family affair, with every sibling lending a hand.

“It was an open kitchen buffet style where you picked out your vegetables and meat and the chef would cook it in a wok,” says Ly. “Having a Chinese restaurant and a bar, customers would always ask, ‘Do you have any Chinese liquor?’ We’d have to say, ‘We have Qingdao [beer],’ and that was it.”

Phan’s frustration at not being able to give his customers what they wanted planted the seed that would become the Vinn Distillery. Phan had put his all into the restaurant but 20 years of the stresses and strains of the industry were getting to him. A doctor told him he should retire.

Not one to stay idle, though, Phan spent his new free time out behind the house, tending the still in the garden.

“Dad said, ‘I’m going to make baijiu and bring it to market,’” Ly remembers, “and we were like, ‘Sure! Enjoy your retirement!’”

For the doubting family, the paperwork involved in becoming a distiller of anything seemed daunting enough, but to become the one and only baijiu producer in the US was close to unimaginable. Meanwhile, though, work in the restaurant without their father by their side was becoming ever more laborious for the siblings.

Suddenly, thanks to Phan, there was an alternative. “We didn’t think he’d actually do it,” says Ly. “But 3½ years later, he had everything done.”

In March 2009, Phan announced he had been awarded his distiller’s licence and told his children to close the restaurant. He needed them to work with him, bringing his impossible vision to fruition. They would sell America on baijiu.

Their father wanted to name the new company Five Siblings but they preferred Vinn Distillery, which is derived from the family’s middle name.

“We were very new to the market; we didn’t understand the industry,” says Ly, of the early days. “You know how wine connoisseurs really understand the nuance of wine, the flavours? We didn’t understand that at all. We just drank.”

Had they known what they would be up against in try­ing to get Americans to drink baijiu they may have quit before they even got started. Luckily, and unbeknown to the Lys, they had two things going for them: time and place.

American drinkers are now more open-minded and adventurous than ever before, craving flavours that even a decade ago would have been considered too intense: puckeringly bitter ales, sour beers, herbaceous amaros, high-proof spirits and funky small-batch natural wines. If there were ever a time for baijiu to gain traction with the American drinking public, this was it. And if there were ever a place, it was their adopted hometown.

“Portland is known around the world for its indepen­dent makers and artisans,” claims Portland Made, a brand that gathers together the small-scale manufacturers of bags and balms, suits and ceramics. While even in major cities in America, small-batch distilling is relatively rare, Portland – a city of less than 700,000 people – has an entire district dedicated to the practice, Distillery Row, where the Vinn facilities are located. The ethos of supporting local endeavour and small businesses trickles down from the city government to the consumer.

“We’re very much craft-oriented here in the Northwest,” says Ly. “It’s the mentality; support the locals, try some­thing new. Portland liquor stores are more willing to take local product over the big national brands and that’s helped us a lot. The community as well, they’re all willing to try something new.

“The past 10 years have been like that for us.”

Vicki Ly corrects her sister, “Actually, our whole lives have been like that. We had just the clothes on our backs when the church took us in. We’ve had a lot of kind people in our lives.”

When the siblings’ father died, in 2012, there was never any doubt the new family business would continue. The Baijiu Family Reserve was created in Phan’s honour, in his preferred strength, in the traditional-style bottle he favour­ed. And that product quickly became Vinn’s biggest seller.

“That’s partially why we’re still out here promoting and pushing it, because it’s his legacy,” says Michelle.

Today, all the siblings – except youngest brother, Quan, who has decamped to Toronto, Canada, but still helps out when he’s at home – and their mother do their part in running the business, with Michelle handling sales and marketing, Vicki accounts. The oldest, Lien, has taken over from her father as distiller and is in charge of overall production. Second-oldest Quyen oversees general oper­ations. “We do have specific tasks we primarily oversee but we all pitch in and do whatever we need to get a job done, so technically, we all do a bit of everything,” Michelle says.

All own an equal share in the company and the siblings have hired three employees to help with running the tasting room, sales and events.

As the family’s expertise has grown so has their product line. Today, the Vinn Distillery offers nine products, including baijius infused with honey and berries, and even a barrel-aged baijiu whiskey, something unheard of in China but proving popular with US drinkers.

“We still produce in very small quantity and the volume depends on the demand and if there are orders we need to fulfil,” says Michelle, adding that Vinn products can be found in stores in five states.

The days of choking down the “medicine” are long gone. Vicki has become known among family and friends for her watermelon baijiu margaritas – though she says she prefers a baijiu mule cocktail “with ginger beer and a lime”. And Michelle has developed a fondness for baijiu bloody Marys. Though both sisters agree that if they’re “feeling lazy”, they just “pour it in a glass and drink it straight”.

While the Lys are undoubtedly America’s baijiu pioneers, “We’re starting to see a lot more brands out there that are trying to break into the market,” says Michelle, with a certain pride.

Ming River, a baijiumade in Sichuan province but branded for US consumers, is finding a foothold in the country and appears on an increasing number of bar menus. And an ever-booming population of affluent migrants to the US means that even if many American customers are slow to warm to baijiu’s charms, Chinese drinkers can be found in sufficient numbers to compensate.

“There are moments when we’re so excited and people are embracing it and then moments of, ‘Oh my gosh, how are we going to keep the lights on,” says Michelle. “At festivals and events, we ask people, and to this day I’d say in the high 80s per cent still don’t know what baijiu even is.”

“That’s true,” chimes in Vicki. “But we’re still alive.”