It was past two in the morning when the smashing started. The ceremony in the temple had ended an hour earlier, and now eight people were standing around tree stumps fixed into the dirt floor of a wooden shed, pounding macerated vine with wooden clubs in a rhythm that matched the hymns being sung — without pause — somewhere off in the dark. The fire under six enormous pots crackled steadily. Logs kept arriving. No one looked tired in the way you'd expect.

This is a feitio, the labor-intensive making of ayahuasca as it's practiced in the Santo Daime tradition of Brazil. If you've been researching ayahuasca retreats and only know the brew as something handed to you in a small cup at the start of a ceremony, the feitio is the part of the story most outsiders never see. It's where the medicine actually comes from — and the part that, more than any other, tells you what kind of culture you'd be stepping into.

What Santo Daime Is, and Why the Brewing Matters

Santo Daime is a Brazilian religion founded in the early 20th century by Mestre Irineu, a tall Afro-Brazilian rubber tapper who, according to the tradition's own lore, received the recipe for the sacrament through a vision in the Amazon forest. The brew is called daime — from the Portuguese for “give me” — and it's made from the same two plants that produce ayahuasca in most other Amazonian traditions: the jagube vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) and the leaves of chacruna (Psychotria viridis), which Santo Daime members affectionately call rainha, the queen.

The chemistry is the same chemistry that underlies every ayahuasca ceremony anywhere. The vine contains beta-carbolines — harmine and its relatives — which switch off the monoamine oxidase enzyme in your gut long enough for the DMT in the chacruna leaves to survive digestion and reach the brain. Without one, the other does nothing. That's the entire trick. Two plants, two roles, one brew.

What makes Santo Daime distinct isn't the pharmacology but the framing. The making of the medicine is itself a ceremony. Hymns are sung continuously while the work happens. Volunteers — including women and children, depending on the task — participate at every stage, from harvesting leaves to scrubbing pots. There's a job for everyone, and the brew you eventually drink in ritual is, in a real sense, something the community has built together with their hands.

The Long Night of the Bateção

The first major task of any feitio is the bateção — the smashing. The jagube vine arrives in thick, woody braids that have to be opened up so the active compounds can leach into the water. Mechanized chopping is used in some places now, but at the temple in Minas Gerais where I'm describing, it's done barefoot, on tree-stump anvils, with wooden clubs.

You strike the vine until the wood splits into fibers as fine as hair. The rhythm matters. The work is paced to hymns that go on for hours, and the strikes fall into the cadence whether you intend them to or not. By four in the morning your shoulders ache and your palms have gone numb, and somehow you're still going, because the song hasn't stopped and the pile of vine hasn't shrunk as much as you'd hoped.

The smashed vine gets layered into 120-liter pots with the chacruna leaves — seven alternating layers per pot, beginning with a bed of coarse vine fibers at the bottom so the green leaves don't touch the hot metal and scorch. A typical pot takes around 40 kilograms of vine, 8 kilograms of leaves, and 60 liters of water. Then it cooks. For hours. The liquid reduces to roughly half its volume, turning a darker yellow-brown, and is drained through a metal gutter into clean containers.

Why a Brew Becomes Sacrament

Here's something most articles about ayahuasca skip over: at this stage, what you've made isn't yet considered daime. It's just a concentrated tea. To become sacrament, the liquid from the first two pots gets poured into a third — assembled with the best of the remaining vine and the most carefully selected leaves — and reduced again over the fire. Only after that second cooking is the brew considered finished. The pots always come in multiples of three, which has both practical and symbolic weight depending on whom you ask.

Straight from the drainer, still hot, the brew tastes more like tea than the bitter, fermented liquid most people associate with ayahuasca. The golden color is genuinely pleasant. The bitterness people complain about in ceremonies tends to come from time in the bottle — the brew keeps fermenting if it isn't packaged hot and sealed tight.

Working through the night, drinking small cups of fresh daime to stay alert, the crew shifts between focused labor and something closer to ceremony. People sing. They joke. Then someone catches a particular phrase in a hymn and the room goes quiet for a verse or two before the clubs start again.

The Degrees of Daime — and Why They Exist

The original recipe, as Mestre Irineu reportedly received it, would have ended at this point. The leftover plant matter would be discarded. The resulting brew is what daimistas call first-degree daime.

But chacruna and jagube don't grow on demand, and as the religion spread out from its Amazonian heartland, the elders had to adapt. Padrinho Sebastião, who took over after Irineu's death, decided to cook the used material a second time, with fresh water, in another set of three pots. The result is second-degree daime. His son Padrinho Alfredo pushed further — third degree, fourth degree, and so on. Each subsequent extraction is weaker per pot, but the leftover material still has something to give.

Then there's a different practice: mixing daimes of different degrees together and cooking new batches with extra chacruna leaves added in. This is where you start hearing terms like:

• 3:1 daime — a stronger brew with three units of original liquid reduced to one
• 5:1 daime — a dark, intense version typically used in healing works and known for producing strong purges
• 10:1 (mel) — viscous and faintly sweet, called “honey” for obvious reasons
• 20:1 and higher — concentrated nearly to a gel, easier to ship to churches abroad

The naming convention is just math: how much original liquid went into how much finished brew. But the experiential difference between them is significant. A 5:1 is not just a stronger sip of a 3:1; it's a different ride, with a different purpose in the ritual life of the community.

What This Tells You About Choosing a Retreat

You're probably not reading this because you want to enroll in a Santo Daime church. You're reading because you're weighing whether plant medicine — and an ayahuasca retreat in particular — is worth taking seriously. Here's what the feitio tells you, even from a distance.

First, ayahuasca traditions are not interchangeable. Santo Daime is one branch — hymn-based, Christian-inflected, communal, ritualized around dancing in formation. The Shipibo lineages of Peru work differently, with icaros sung individually over each participant. The União do Vegetal is another distinct Brazilian tradition. Vegetalista curanderos in the upper Amazon run yet another model. When a retreat says it offers “ayahuasca ceremonies,” ask which tradition it draws from, and how the medicine itself was made.

Second, the question of who brewed your daime — and how — is not a small detail. In serious traditions, the medicine carries the intention and care of the people who made it. A retreat that buys brew from an unknown source is materially and ethically different from one where you can ask to see the kitchen. You don't need to be a purist about this, but you should know which kind of operation you've signed up for.

Third — and this is the part I'd most want a friend to hear before booking anything — ayahuasca is sometimes pursued as a tool for healing from addiction, depression, trauma, or stuck patterns. It can absolutely play a role. But it works best inside a culture, with people who know what they're doing, who follow a recipe handed down from someone who followed a recipe handed down from someone else. The feitio is a reminder that this medicine has a context. Take that context seriously and the experience tends to take care of itself.

A Closing Image

After two nights and a long final day at the Heaven of the Divine Star, the work produced roughly 140 liters of daime. It was bottled hot and sealed quickly to slow fermentation. Some of it was served at the closing ceremony — a bailado, a dancing ritual that can last hours. Participants stay inside rectangles painted on the floor, stepping always to the left first, moving through the three permitted rhythms: march, waltz, mazurka. From the outside, someone described it as the back-and-forth motion of a gear. From the inside, with the daime moving through you and a hymn rising from sixty voices at once, it's harder to describe and easier to feel.

If anything about this glimpse into the tradition has nudged you toward exploring further, a range of vetted ayahuasca retreats — including ones in Brazilian and Amazonian lineages — can be browsed on our marketplace here. Go slowly. Ask the questions you need to ask. The medicine has been around a long time, and so have the people who know how to hold it.