David Souza

“Farm to Fermenter”

David John Souza was born in February 1975 and grew up on his family’s farm outside Atwater, in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Souza is a fourth-generation sweet-potato farmer, raised in the rows of D&S Farms, a multigenerational operation that has been growing sweet potatoes and Merced rye in the region since 1917. From childhood, Souza’s education was largely practical and rooted in the fields. He started working on the farm at about seven years old, learning how to plant, harvest, and handle sweet potatoes, rye, and almonds. By the time he was fifteen, his grandfather helped him get started farming sweet potatoes on his own, and for two years they worked together before the older man stepped back into semi-retirement. Souza then farmed on his own through his mid-twenties, deepening his understanding of the soils, irrigation, and crop rotations that would later become central to his whiskey.

By that time, the farm itself was already a family saga. Souza’s great-grandfather had emigrated from the Azores to the United States in 1917, eventually settling in Atwater and establishing the sweet-potato and rye operation that became D&S Farms. Over the decades, the family became known in California agriculture for innovation by their early adoption of drip irrigation, new harvesting systems, and careful storage practices for sweet potatoes. 

By the early 2000s, however, Souza wanted to test himself beyond the farm. At age twenty-eight, he left for Las Vegas. There, he started an event-promotion company and bought a handful of franchise restaurants, immersing himself in the nightlife and bottle-service culture. Selling big-brand vodka at high prices made him wonder why he and his colleagues weren’t pushing a product of their own. The experience gave him both a front-row view of the spirits business and the spark of an idea: he would create a spirit tied to something he knew better than almost anyone—sweet potatoes. 

Souza eventually sold his Las Vegas businesses and returned home to Atwater, determined to build a “farm-to-bottle” brand. Back on the family’s roughly 2,000-acre sweet-potato farm, he began experimenting with distillation. In 2007 he bought a book on distilling, ordered parts online, and built a small still from two beer kegs, copper pipe, an electric cooktop, and a condenser he’d sourced on the internet. For roughly a year and a half, he worked days on the farm and nights in his garage, distilling batch after batch of sweet-potato spirit and trying to solve a challenge few others had attempted: turning a starchy, complex root into clean, high-proof alcohol. Sweet potatoes proved difficult. It took about 25 pounds of potatoes to make a single 750-ml bottle. D&S Farms grew multiple varieties, and Souza learned that some yielded more alcohol while others delivered better flavor, eventually settling on a proprietary blend that balanced both. The first commercial result of all that trial and error was a sweet-potato vodka, which finally debuted in 2010, initially branded “High Roller Vodka,” a nod to his Las Vegas days. The vodka found some success in restaurants, but it struggled to compete with big brands in the casino market, where expensive sponsorship deals dominated. Realizing the limitations of that path, Souza wound down the High Roller label and re-imagined the brand around his family farm in Atwater. 

The new spirits company took a deeply personal name: Corbin Cash, after Souza’s son, Corbin Cash Souza. In fact, the day the distillery produced its first batch of whiskey was also the day Souza’s wife, Maria, went into labor with Corbin. 

As distilling moved from garage experiment to full-scale operation on the farm, Souza’s attention turned decisively toward whiskey. For generations, the family had planted Merced rye as a cover crop between sweet-potato plantings, helping manage nitrogen and protect the soil. Rather than till all of that rye back into the ground, he began fermenting and distilling it, crafting a 100% Merced rye whiskey and calling it simply, “Corbin Cash Merced Rye,” but also crafting the “1917” rye line, typically aged several years in custom-charred American white-oak barrels.