SPRING CLEAN YOUR SPIRITS

Nigel Huddleston looks at some of the micro-trends and businesses whose innovations will help shape the category in the months ahead been specifically designed to be mixed with tonic for a drink that wine communicator Tom Surgey thinks has “more energy and verve than a classic G&T”.

Like its wood-aged sister brand Lowland, Ranger is steeped in spiral wrack seaweed but then flavoured with slices of apple and lime for a lighter, citrus profile.

Black-owned businesses

Fawn Weaver set up the US whiskey business Uncle Nearest in 2017, honouring the 19th century Tennessee whiskey pioneer Nearest Green, aka the Uncle Nearest that the brand is named after.

The original Green was the first known African-American master distiller, and his great-great-granddaughter and awardwinning master blender Victoria Eady Butler is on the present day Uncle Nearest team.

The brand has just launched in the UK through Mangrove, with two iterations available: 1844 (RRP £55) and 1856 (RRP £65).

Spearhead Spirits is a UK company founded by Chris Frederick and Damola Timeyin to market African spirits. Its first two products are Vusa (RRP around £25), a vodka distilled with sugar cane from Kwazulu-Natal, and Bayab (RRP around £30), a gin made from Zambian baobab – also known as the tree of life –and African juniper, coriander, rosemary, cinnamon, salt and citrus peel.

Frederick says: “Our brands not only increase diversity and challenge cultural bias in the sector but, being produced on the African continent, allow us to show the world what Africans have always known about this culturally and resource-rich continent.”

Wine-influenced vodka

Louis Latour Agencies began shipping the French vodka Cobalte (RRP £47) last year. It comes from the Iconic Nectars stable which also includes Cognac Frapin and Champagne Gosset. It’s made in Aÿ-Champagne from Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier grapes from Montagne de Reims, which Latour says gives it “minerality, roundness of fruit and freshness,” with a silky-smooth finish. The grapes are vinified before being distilled with the lees five times.

Meeghan Murdoch, operations manager at the Glenrinnes Distillery in Speyside, studied at Plumpton College before working as a winemaker in Germany, France and New Zealand. This led her to experiment with barrel-ageing the producer’s Eight Lands Organic vodka. Virgin oak casks were first filled with brandy, and then 31-year-old Muscat wine, before finally being filled with vodka. The finished BarrelAged Organic (RRP £37) is unmistakeably a vodka but with subtle layers of apricot, vanilla and raisin.

Café culture

If there’s one flavour trend that’s having its moment it’s coffee, partly as producers and distributors respond to Bacardí’s controversial decision to take its cult Patron XO Café brand off the market to preserve tequila stocks.

Tequila brand Bandero is aiming to fill the void with Bandero Café (in the region of £43), a 35% abv small-batch coffeeinfused tequila available through Deckers Trading.

Mentzendorff has launched Luxumus (RRP £29), a liqueur for coffee lovers made in small batches by blending five-times distilled alcohol with sugar, cocoa, vanilla and citrus fruit. It’s recommended served with espresso coffee on the rocks in the Mexican carajillo serve.

Kent’s Copper Rivet – maker of Dockyard gin – has also entered the coffee liqueur market with Son of a Gun Coffee Liqueur (RRP around £23).

Italy’s Luxardo is launching its Espresso Liqueur (RRP £26-£28) through Amber Beverage UK. It’s made through a 30-day heated infusion of mainly arabica coffee from Brazil, Colombia and Kenya with neutral spirit.

Genre-bending brands

Never Say Die is a whiskey described by its makers as “England’s first bourbon”, named after the first American horse to win the Epsom Derby, in 1954, and comes in a bottle that features the colours worn by its jockey Lester Piggott. Legend has it that the horse had experienced a traumatic birth only to be revived by a dram of whiskey.

“But an English bourbon – how does that work?” you may rightly ask. Well, it was distilled and matured first in Kentucky, put on a boat and “ocean-aged” for six weeks, and then finished further in oak at the White Peaks Distillery in Derbyshire. Never Say Die Barrel Strength (RRP £79) is distributed by Essex-based N10 Bourbons.

Co-founder Martha Dalton describes it as “lively with spice and citrus that melts into vanilla, leather and caramel”, making it “great served neat or over a single large block of ice, but with enough strength and depth of flavour to hold up to mixing in classic whiskey cocktails”.