Ecuador’s capital hosts its first Quito Cocktail Week from July 5 to 11, 2026, a week-long platform built around education, competition, and the country’s emerging cocktail identity.
For the first time, Quito will gather bartenders, operators, producers, and brands under a single banner dedicated to professionalizing Ecuadorian hospitality. Spearheaded by bartender, entrepreneur, and educator Edwin Lobo, founder of Andes Bar Academy and Código 86 Speakeasy, the inaugural edition is positioned less as a festival and more as a working platform for an industry in transition.
A Week Built Around Education and Exchange
The program opens on July 5 with Andes Shakers, a nationwide bartender competition pulling talent from across Ecuador’s regions to compete before a panel of industry judges on creativity, technique, and innovation. It is the first national contest of its kind tied to the event and is designed to surface emerging talent rather than crown an established circuit.
The centerpiece is the Quito Cocktail Week Congress, running July 6 to 8 at Universidad San Francisco de Quito. Across three days, Ecuadorian and international speakers lead lectures, panels, and networking sessions covering hospitality management, sustainability, entrepreneurship, creativity, and bar operations. From July 5 through July 11, satellite experiences, guest shifts, and tastings unfold across the city’s bars and restaurants, opening the program up to the public.
An Industry on the Rise, in a Difficult Moment
Lobo is candid about the context. Ecuador’s hospitality sector has been squeezed by regional insecurity that has forced operators to rethink models and, in some cases, to close. Against that backdrop, he argues, professionalization is the most useful response the industry can mount.
“More than just an event, we aim to build a platform that drives the industry’s growth,” Lobo says. “We want to demonstrate that it is possible to build solid projects that raise hospitality standards in Ecuador.”
Historically, Ecuador has not been a bar-led market. Consumption gravitated toward restaurants, nightclubs, and a fairly traditional cocktail offer. That is shifting. A new generation of bartenders and operators is building venues with defined concepts and a hospitality-first approach, and a small but meaningful pool of investors is starting to read bars as businesses with their own identity rather than appendages to a kitchen.
Ecuador as Raw Material
One of the threads running through the first edition is Ecuador’s potential as a gastronomic source. The country’s larder, stretching from the Pacific coast to the Amazon, is among the most biodiverse in Latin America, and more than 50 Indigenous communities continue to hold living knowledge of ingredients, techniques, and traditions that have barely entered the contemporary cocktail conversation.
“We always say that the bar is culture,” Lobo explains. The framing is deliberate: Andes Bar Academy has trained more than 5,000 professionals who now work across 20-plus countries, and Lobo has consistently positioned the bar as a vehicle for cultural and community development rather than pure commerce.
Participating brands include Gin Horizonte, Ron Abuelo Panamá, Gin Citadelle, Planteray Rum, and Bodega Overproof, alongside a notable contingent of small Ecuadorian producers who have backed the project early.
Why the Industry Should Pay Attention
Quito Cocktail Week arrives at a moment when Latin American cocktail culture is being rewritten city by city, with Bogotá, Lima, Mexico City, and Medellín each carving out distinct identities. Ecuador has been largely absent from that conversation. Lobo’s bet is that the country has the ingredients, the talent, and now the platform to enter it on its own terms.
“We are a young scene, still growing, but driven by people building projects with real commitment and a strong sense of quality,” he says. For visiting professionals, the pitch is straightforward: a compact week of programming in a city that most of the region’s bartenders have never worked in, with direct access to producers and operators who are shaping what Ecuadorian cocktail culture will look like over the next decade.
Lobo’s own pipeline extends the point. Alongside Código 86, Sótano Bar, and Bodega Overproof, he opens Códice Cocktail Room in June 2026, weeks before the inaugural week begins.
What Success Looks Like
Asked what would mark a successful first edition, Lobo keeps it pragmatic. “When the event ends, I want bartenders, bars, brands, and guests to ask us when the next one will be.” Over five years, he wants the platform to be recognized by the public sector as well, with hospitality and beverages understood as drivers of employment, tourism, and cultural identity rather than peripheral industries.
For now, the first edition has the harder job: proving that Quito belongs on the Latin American bar map. With the program in place and a producer-heavy lineup behind it, Quito Cocktail Week 2026 has a credible shot at doing exactly that.
