The Most Innovative Spirits Revolutionizing the Crafts Spirits Game
There’s never been a better time to order a stiff drink. We’re in the thick of a spirits renaissance, where distillers, blenders, and cocktail creators are pushing the envelope to develop new flavors, reimagine classics, and elevate local ingredients. To celebrate and explore these exciting developments as part of the Men’s Journal Spirits Awards, we spoke to experts in the field to spotlight today’s most innovative spirits. Though one bottle stood out: the innovative and eco-friendly Empirical Symphony 6 gin.
While our Spirits Awards have covered more traditional categories, like the best bourbon or best Canadian whiskies to drink right now, our list of the most innovative spirits ventures into fresh territory. These award-winning bottles come from across the liquor spectrum, showcasing revelatory gins and boundary-breaking brandy.
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Why You Should Trust Me
I’ve written about wine and spirits for over a decade. My work has appeared in Men’s Journal, Wine Enthusiast, InsideHook, Spirited, Liquor.com, and Travel & Leisure. I've traveled across the globe, visiting the world’s top bars and tasting all matter of rum and cocktails. My liquor cabinet has grown so big, it has its own storage unit.
Outside of my personal experience, I spoke with Liam Broom, venue manager of Silverleaf at Pan Pacific London; Maros Dzurus, bar manager of Himkok in Oslo; Michael Sager, owner of London’s Equal Parts; and Kevin Rigault, bar manager at Hôtel de Crillon in Paris.
What We Look for When Choosing the Most Innovative Spirits
Searching for innovative spirits certainly leaves room for interpretation. For Dzurus it means “creating new and exciting ideas, techniques, and products. It's about pushing boundaries and offering unique experiences to consumers.”
“I looked for spirits that champion ingredients that are not typically represented, or methods that are above and beyond what I consider the norm,” says Broom. Michael Sager, owner of London’s Equal Parts, considered products that “create truly disruptive boundary-crossing and category-overlapping new spirits.”
Related: The 15 Best Scotch Whiskies of 2023
We picked each of these spirits after speaking with these professionals from across the globe about what they see as the best recent innovations. We considered new maturation and distillation techniques, inventive flavors, category disruption, how brands were able to get their products to consumers, and use of eco-friendly practices in both production and packaging methods.
Each product on this list carries the flag for one of these interpretations, helping to define the future of spirits. In the end, we choose, as Kevin Rigault says, “spirits that break the status quo not for the sake of marketing purposes but rather because they believe in a vision and precision in what they are doing.”
The Most Innovative Spirits of the Year
Courtesy of Domaine des Hautes Glaces
“The biggest innovation that I saw this year is the traceability in spirits and working with more and more local ingredients,” commented Rigault. “Woska by Domaine des Hautes Glaces is one of the best in my opinion.”
An organic farm and distillery in the French Alps, Hautes Glaces controls every piece of their spirits making process. Thanks to their end-to-end control of the supply chain, they put their commitments into action at every stage of production: self-produced seeds and yeasts, local cereals from organic, regenerative and collective farming, water recycling, renewable local and circular energy, as well as eco-designed bottles made from wild glass.
This rye brandy is made like vodka, but more reminiscent of mezcal. An initially smoky nose gives way to more earthy, rooty characteristics, leading to drier, spicy notes. The body is silky and enveloping, featuring notes of sweet almond milk and freshly malted cereal. The palate lingers with warm notes of cut hay, leading to a finish of licorice and a discreet bitterness.
Courtesy Image
Aging is a huge focus for brands right now, says Broom. And this Talisker is its pinnacle. Over the last few decades, more distilleries began creating new flavors by moving whisky to different types of casks for a few years in a finishing process. This allows distilleries to release more limited-edition bottlings and also take their current inventory to places it’s never been before.
The spotlight on aging led to the introduction of ultra-aging, where brands take some of itheir oldest stocks and finally bottling it, often after putting it through a new finishing process. Since many major distilleries own warehouses filled with decades-old casks, they’ve been pushing the boundaries of just how old these new releases are, and how they are finished ahead of bottling.
Just last month, Talisker took ultra-aging a step further with the release of its Glacial Edge Aged 45 Years Single Malt Scotch Whisky. To create it, Talisker took 40-year-old single malt and finished it in 12 heavily-charred American Oak casks that it had sent on a glacial voyage into Canada’s ice fields. A cooper removed the ends of the casks, exposing them to sub-zero temperatures and biting Arctic winds for 96 hours. This allowed the extreme cold to fracture the wood, which in turn increased the surface area of the casks, altering the liquid’s interactions with the barrels during the finishing period in Scotland.
Courtesy of Glendalough
Unlike most spirits makers, Irish distillery Glendalough changes its gin recipe each year. That’s because they forage wild botanicals in the Wicklow mountains south of Dublin all year round to make their gin. Geraldine Kavanagh, their full-time forager, brings the botanicals to the distillery within hours of foraging. That’s why the brand uses the saying “a year in every bottle” when describing their gin. Each blend captures a piece of time in Ireland
On the nose, the gin offers notes of fresh juniper, citrus, and pine. The palate is cool and mellow at first, bursting with summer flowers, autumn fruits, and warm spice. The finish is long and sylvan with winter spices lingering throughout.
Courtesy of Seven Tails
Launched in late 2022, Seven Tails Spiced is the world’s first spiced brandy and it may even help to get brandy out of the lurch it finds itself in global markets. It offers flavors of coffee bean, vanilla, and burnt butter, which give way to subtle notes of cherry stone and dried citrus. To create Seven Tails Spiced, the brand’s master distiller aged grape brandy in oak barrels for a minimum of 12 months, then naturally flavored it with spices and bottle at 40.7% ABV.
“The Seven Tails Spiced by Joel Fraser was a huge breakthrough in the brandy market,” says Broom. “Spiced rum is a huge category and Joel identified a gap in the market and neatly filled it with a spiced brandy.”
Courtesy of Fernet Hunter
Fernet Hunter Cacao Fernet “finally gives us a Cacao spirit or liqueur which packs serious flavor and isn’t too sweet,” says Sager. “It also brings a previously non-consumer friendly category—Fernet—into the consumer space.”
Created 30 kilometers outside Linz, Austria by Raphael Holzer, fourth generation spirits maker and founder of Fernet Hunter, this classic take on the Italian bitter. Cacao is a notoriously difficult flavor to capture, with a variety of brands attempting to use it in new bottlings over recent years to different degrees of success. Fernet Hunter’s Cacao Ferent finds that the famed Italian amaro’s bitter, herbaceous, and root-y profile mixes perfectly with the bitter, earthy dark chocolate notes of cacao. Unfortunately, you have to be in Hong Kong (or maybe Austria) to get your hands on it.
