Sweetdram Whisky Amaro - COMING SOON
From Sweetdram:
‘Amaro’ is a very popular type of bittersweet Italian liqueur that’s typically drank after dinner to aid digestion. They’re commonly wine-based, but we can’t grow grapes in Scotland – so we figured, why not combine two of our all-time favourite things (whisky and amaro) and try to create a completely new, completely unique drink.
The inception of Whisky Amaro came about back in 2015 as part of a collaboration with Kings County Distillery, Brooklyn, who were the first whiskey distillery in New York City to reopen since Prohibition. The challenge we set ourselves: use botanicals and their unaged whiskey – called ‘moonshine’ in the States – to create a dry liqueur that mimicked the flavour of an aged whiskey, but without using any oak. It was just a bit of fun, and limited to only a few hundred bottles, but it planted a seed in our head: given how well that trifecta of allspice, coriander and hibiscus worked with the grain, could we use it as a starting point for an even more complex and progressive spirit? After 3 years of intensive recipe development, we had a delicious, definitive answer.
The Producer
Sweetdram was founded in 2014 by Andrew MacLeod Smith and Daniel Fisher, who met in 2011 while studying for their Master’s degrees in brewing and distilling at Heriot-Watt University. After the course, the pair kept in touch to flesh out an idea they had for a modern drinks brand focused entirely on original flavour instead of conventional categories and repetitive trends. In 2014, they started Sweetdram from a tiny but well-designed work space in Dalston, London. The initial concept for the brand was to become the industry's first ‘gypsy’ distillers, who collaborate with various distilling partners around the world to make one off expressions that push categorical boundaries in terms of flavour and style.
The first of these nomadic collaborations resulted in the revival of a nearly defunct botanical spirit called Escubac with the historic Distillerie Combier. Further collaborations with the East London Rum Company and Brooklyn’s King’s County Distillery established Sweetdram as unconventional risk-takers with a drive to create singular, contemporary spirits. These successful projects inspired the move to Scotland—Andrew’s childhood home and Daniel’s home away from home where he lived prior to co-founding Sweetdram—where they established a new production facility in a massive industrial warehouse in Sighthill, Edinburgh.
It is in this immersive, contemporary space that Sweetdram now crafts its innovate liqueurs and spirits using a custom copper pot still with a helix coil head. Additionally, this permanent location has allowed Sweetdram to expand into independent bottling with the launch of a whisky program—the curation of which predates the inception of Sweetdram—using sourced casks matured throughout Scotland.
Start stocking the best this great wide world has to offer, the spirits will thank you.