People, Place, and Produce — How Agriculture, Secondary Ingredients, and Trade Routes Define Spirits’ Identities — Good Beer Hunting

May 01, 2023

It was mid-winter in Portland, Oregon and the air was damp. It was the sort of cold that seeps in at the seams of your clothes, gathers at the nape of your neck, and sends little shivers down your spine. I stood in a whiskey warehouse, and, between shivers, paused to take a sip of a dram that had come straight from a barrel.

That first taste instantly transported me back to eating panettone at Christmas: the notes of baking spices, dried fruit, and airy sweetness. Then I learned that the barrel was an ex-red-wine cask from an American winemaker who works primarily with Italian grapes, and has a very Italian approach to growing and producing. Those notes of festive spice that so defined the whiskey didn't just result from the base spirit—it was the wood, and the ghost of a wine that had once inhabited it, which contributed that unique character.

It's easy to see spirits as singular entities whose flavor derives from one base ingredient: whiskey from corn or barley, rum from sugarcane, tequila from agave. But by focusing exclusively on the main component of a given spirit, we often miss the full story.

Even if we aren't always aware, the traces of other histories, processes, and constituent parts—wood-aging, secondary ingredients, and even the fields in which those ingredients were grown—all impact the final drink. It's also easy to forget that the making of booze is an age-old agricultural tradition braided with the cycle of farming. By investigating the ingredients, production techniques, or sourcing routes that underlie our favorite spirits, we can trace overlooked histories and see more clearly the multiplicity in our glasses, as well as the labor—and love—inherent to their making.

Today, a number of innovative young drinks brands are refocusing on these narratives, and telling the story of their spirits in a way that reveals these hidden histories. In forging a closer connection between soil and sip, they seek to deepen our understanding of sourcing, and situate alcohol not as a placeless commodity, but as a product born of people, trade routes, and landscapes.

The idea that spirits derive their flavor from more than just their base ingredients—and that these additional components have their own agricultural stories—is readily apparent within the amaro category. These bitter, herbal liqueurs, for centuries made in Italy (and elsewhere in Europe), are defined not only by the base fodder—usually a grape or sugar beet distillate—but also by the myriad botanicals that add complexity to that foundation.

"Amaros were something that could be made from your garden, and are a representation of local terroir," says Rob Berry, a co-founder of Asterley Brothers, a family-run distillery in South London that specializes in vermouth and amaro. Typically made using a mix of herbs, bark, roots and spices, European herbal liqueurs were initially seen as medicinal before they found favor as digestifs in the 1800s. Oftentimes, grapes or leftover wine were taken to the village distiller to be transformed into a spirit before being further infused with botanicals. "Every village, every family had, and still has, their own recipe," Berry says.

The complex botanical profiles of these liqueurs are often informed by what grows regionally, as Berry mentions, but in more contemporary cases they also tell the story of more specific international trade routes and how they intersect with homegrown traditions. In the case of Asterley Brothers, the formula for their Dispense Amaro combines past and present influences both local and global. The foundation is based on a collection of medicinal recipes from the 17th-century London Dispensatory—a catalogue of liqueurs and tonics—combined with an old family recipe from Sicily, where Berry's wife was born. Ingredients like orange a nod to the Sicilian heritage, while ginger, lemongrass, and cardamon reflect the produce that abounds in their South London neighborhood, where many Turkish grocers operate. These international influences come into play alongside English touches of rosemary, apricots, hops, and vermouth made from British Pinot Noir grapes.

All together, the total medley of flavors speaks to the tail end of the agricultural chain, prioritizing the connections, the people, and the traders responsible for bringing these ingredients to market. In turn, the amaro illuminates how London has always been a place embedded with global connections.

In some cases, these complex narratives unfold from a single ingredient in a recipe, like in the case of Amaro Santoni, a new product from the eponymous family-owned brand based in Tuscany, which has produced drinks since the ’60s. Alongside 34 other botanicals, rhubarb root is the backbone of the drink. "For more than 60 years they have been working with rhubarb," says managing partner Luca Missaglia. "Stefano Sanonti discovered a lost amaro recipe of his father [founder Gabriello], with rhubarb. He decided to refine it and created this amaro."

Rhubarb is familiar to many across Europe, and has long been used within medicinal elixirs—in Florence in particular, Missaglia explains—but is originally from China. It arrived in Italy via complex global trade routes that date back to at least the medieval era. The intermediaries were Muslim merchants, and the trade routes across Asia to Europe were facilitated by the stability provided by the Mongolian empire (which lasted from approximately 1260 to 1350). "Muslim societies introduced many luxury products to Europe and served as trendsetters for fashion, even though Islam and Christianity were mortal religious enemies," Paul Freedman writes in his book, "Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination."

Amaro Santoni retraces that history by using rhubarb sourced from Shaanxi, a province in northwestern China. This particular variety has a history within the Florentine region. Missaglia explains that Santoni's amaro is made near one of the biggest ports that this rhubarb was imported through. "This type of rhubarb has a specific pink heart where the root is, and this is what we use," he says, explaining that this ‘heart’ offers rich flavors and constitutes only approximately 10% of the root. This brings a distinct sweetness to the spirit, with unique floral undertones. The care and labor, and the specificity of the plant, are key to the drink.

If the idea of the "local" in amaro also incorporates ancient and current trade routes, gin—a cousin spirit to the liqueur, also literally steeped with botanicals—is an even broader drink of the world. With roots that trace back to the Dutch spirit genever, which dates to the 13th century, the story of the juniper-fueled spirit is one that now sweeps the globe, shining a light on various cultures and identities in its wake.

Gin distilling in the U.K. began in earnest when a law passed in 1690, stipulating that only a token payment for custom was needed to start a distilling business, allowing farmers and landowners to use excess grain to produce spirits. Soon after, spirits were permitted to be distilled at home, cheaply, leading to a "Gin Craze" followed by subsequent bans. In a short time, this spirit evolved from a way to use agricultural waste to "mother's ruin."

Later, gin took on a new guise as a colonial export thanks to the British East India Company, a private company that reigned as a brutal capitalist project on the Indian subcontinent from 1757 to 1858. When paired with tonic water, which contained quinine, it was considered an antimalarial remedy, first drunk by military men before it gained wider popularity. Keeping pace with Britain's colonial endeavors, the spirit's reputation elevated as it became associated with the white colonial consumers who occupied positions of power. The G&T soon became synonymous with the tropics and in particular with the Indian subcontinent.

To limit the legacy of gin to colonial dominion, or disreputable drinking dens in London, only tells half the story. In the last decade, gin has had a resurgence in popularity—there are currently 820 gin distilleries in the U.K., up from 190 in 2015—and the spirit is now made in countries all over the world, many of which aim to express a sense of regional identity with the botanicals used to flavor the spirit. The European Union's definition of gin states that the predominant element must be juniper, but sometimes the juniper in question has the power to tell an interesting story that allows us to look at traditional ingredients and understand place, plants, and histories in a new way.

Take Hapusa Himalayan Dry Gin from India, for example. "The juniper we get is foraged from across the Himalayas; we often get high-quality berries from Nepal, Pakistan, Tibet and even Afghanistan," says Anand Virmani, CEO and master distiller. The flavor of these juniper berries is earthy and bold, Virmani says, like walking in a pine forest in the mountains. By harnessing this regional juniper, Hapusa is producing a gin representative of its region, one not dependent on colonial history.

The rest of Hapusa's botanicals come from India, from regions that specialize in each of the spices, elevating agricultural expertise and labor as central to the drink: This gin is not merely flavored by spice and botanicals, but by the agricultural specialists of India. The brand's turmeric comes from Tamil Nadu, whereas the raw mango comes from the Himalayan foothills in Uttarakhand; Hapusa's other key ingredients are coriander seeds, gondhoraj (a lime, from northeastern India), ginger, cardamom, and almond.

"India is a large country and we do not try to package all of it into a convenient box of clichés," Virmani explains. "We are hoping to be able to tell the story of our gin and its botanicals against the backdrop of modern India. One of these backdrops happens to be that of the Himalayas, where we are truly able to connect with the untainted and raw terrain, cultures, and hospitality."

Developing new stories that depart from colonial history is not just relevant for gin, but is also key to rum.

Modern-day rum was born of the brutal labors of sugarcane plantations in the Americas, part of an agricultural system that was reliant on enslaved and indentured people. Its exact beginnings are uncertain, but some of its earliest written records, which use the term "rumbullion" to describe the sugarcane-derived spirit, date to Barbados in 1647. The technologies used to make it were developed by enslaved people, and the spirit became an exported commodity in the system of Atlantic triangle trade in the 17th and 18th centuries, as Sidney W. Mintz explains in "Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History."

Outside of the Americas, Indian Ocean islands like Mauritius, Reunion, and the Seychelles also have a strong history of rum production. Previously uninhabited, and with their tropical climates, they became perfect places for spice, sugar, and other plantations developed for European colonial powers; those powers, including England and France, forcibly transported Indentured and enslaved people to labor in their fields.

For centuries, rum's reputation was shaped by these origins. "Rum was essentially a byproduct of the imperial sugar trade, and because it could be made and produced cheaper than Scotch or wine, the social culture of rum was considered to be low-class and unrefined," writes Puerto Rican historian Israel Meléndez Ayala in a piece for Sourced.

Today, rum is a vast and varied category, with different hues, grades, components, and production categories. Its reputation is evolving as more people start asking: With a global history so entrenched in pain and exploitation, how do we find a way to drink, make, and impart rum with any sense of joy?

Ian Burrell, the global rum ambassador and co-founder of rum brand Equiano, tells me that enslaved Africans often brought seeds and plants with them when they were forcibly taken to the Americas, as well as passed-down knowledge such as how to incorporate flavors into spirits. These people provided the labor—from growing and harvesting goods on plantations to cooking and distilling—and also the creative ingenuity.

For Burrell, who is of Caribbean heritage, honoring the people who were involved in rum's history is a way of rewriting the narrative for future generations. His brand is named after Olaudah Equiano, who was a victim of the transatlantic slave trade before buying his freedom in 1766 and becoming a leader of the abolitionist movement in Britain. It is the first African-and-Caribbean-owned rum brand, and the first to center that history; it starts its story in Mauritius before heading to Barbados, where it is blended with a Caribbean rum. The latter contributes notes of vanilla, citrus peel, brown sugar, and caramel, while the former imparts notes of cocoa, dark fruits, oak, and spices to the blend, Burrell explains, adding how he believes that there needs to be a broader reclamation of rum before the work is done. "It is vital that we know the past, but what is important is what we do now," he says.

Finding a personal connection is another way to appreciate rum's history in all its complexity, a strategy used by the Seychelles-made rum brand Takamaka. Head blender Steven Rioux traveled the country's islands, visiting its spice growers, to find the perfect ingredients for Takamaka's spiced rum, Zepis Kreol. Through trial and error, he landed on a spice blend influenced by personal memory and a relationship to food and culture. "I knew it was ‘good’ when it made me think of Mum or Grandmother's cooking," he explains.

As many ingredients used in contemporary spiced rums are originally from elsewhere, it can strip nuance from the drink and make "the rum market into something more of a globalisation and post-colonial story," Melendez Ayala said in an interview. Takamaka is a post-colonial story, but it is one that homes in on detail and locality—drinking the spirit is like tasting the foods of the country's people, the fragrant notes of cinnamon bark, clove nutmeg, and allspice leaves running through it. What is important is not just the way these spices influence the flavor of the rum—they also express something akin to a reclamation of agency for the future of the spirit, by the people who make it.

Wood is also an agricultural ingredient that imbues flavor into a spirit and tells a story that is crucial to the idea of place, even if it's rarely thought of that way. With whiskey, wood is often spoken about in terms of prestige, age, or how the spirit is finished—but we can also reconceptualize it as evidence of environment, agriculture, and community connections.

Miles Munroe, master distiller and blender at U.S. single-malt producer Westward Whiskey, defines the ingredients in whiskey as grain, water, yeast, wood, and time. "Every distiller has a stylistic choice on how they feature each of the different parts," he says. "Being deliberate will yield great results that tell a real story about where your spirit is from." Unlike the rules that dictate how Bourbon must be aged in new charred American oak casks, the newly enshrined standard of identity for American Single Malt whiskey states that the spirit only has to be aged in oak barrels, which opens up a conversation around wood use within the category.

For Westward, the relationship with wood is entwined with the idea of exchange: they often source barrels from other local beverage makers like brewers and small winemakers from Oregon's Willamette Valley American Viticultural Area, just 45 minutes from the distillery. "We have a direct connection with the origins of the casks and know any important details," Munroe says. "That is rare in the world market of used casks."

For the Pinot Noir Cask release, for example, the barrels are still wet with wine when whiskey goes in, which imparts a clear influence. "Aging in new American oak gives vanilla and coconut, and then finishing in the pinot casks of French oak adds grassy and herbaceous notes along with a dry finish that keeps all the sweet notes from reading as cloying on the palate," Munroe adds. But it is less about looking for particular flavor characteristics, he says, and more about enjoying and respecting how the winemaker works—the relationship is one of collaborating and sharing with other agricultural producers in the region, creating a stronger sense of community in the process.

Meanwhile, another U.S. whiskey brand looks even closer to home, developing a close connection between liquid and trees. Whistle Pig is a whiskey brand with a young, female-led team; it started aging spirits in 2015 with an ethos of innovation anchored in the landscape. "Because we have zero generations of whiskey making, we’re able to throw the rulebook out the window, and create our own legacy," says Liz Rhoades, Whistle Pig's head of development. Based in rural Vermont, the distillery sits on 500 acres, where it grows the grains for its spirits and the trees for its casks.

They did a lot of trials over years to find a variety of rye that made sense economically and was climate-efficient in the field, Rhoades explains, because "sustainability is a huge part of our agenda. We want to be stewards of land and use our resources the best way possible." They also have a maple forest, which they partner with a local company to tap, before aging the syrup in their dry casks. "I know terroir means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But for us, it's about our grain, it's about our water, and it's about our trees. So whether that's our maple forest, or our Vermont oak."

By using the trees on their land, harvesting them, and then working with a cooperage, they are closely connected to the entirety of the whiskey-making process. "What I am most passionate about in whiskey is that it is an agricultural product in the true sense, from crop to cask. We need to respect that," Rhoades says.

They can also clearly see the labor involved, from replanting to the effects of weather. A few years ago there was an American oak shortage, which Rhoades says was related to climate change; during a recent rainy spell, the forests were too muddy to harvest the wood. Being attuned to the local environment in this way (instead of the disconnect of buying pre-fabricated casks from typical sellers), and finding workarounds to adapt to unexpected situations when they arise, shows how the company has made whiskey making a symbiotic relationship between people and place.

I have a bottle of Westward pinot noir cask finish. It often comes out at the end of a long workday, and I pour some to sip as I type, as dusk descends and moonlight begins to shine across my desk. The glass of whiskey sits beside a small bowl of rice, the last harvest my dad planted, and a vial of ash I was gifted from what was left of a section of Amazonian rainforest that was razed to the ground to make way for mass agriculture.

The other side of my desk contains a sapling of a Kowhai tree (a native of New Zealand, one of my places of origin) which I hope I will plant outside one day. From my desk I can look out to the street's gardens and see the neighborhood cats and foxes roaming among the herbs and vegetables that other people have planted. The memory of grapes grown in Oregon soil is light on my lips as the whiskey hits my tongue, and seems appropriate in this setting. Even within the urban, built-up spaces of London, a sense of environment, landscape, and agriculture abounds. Wherever we go, we need to find those stories, and cherish them.