Introducing: The Spirits Store
Plus an exclusive Negroni Week offer!
Hello -
Now, I am not one for the hard sell. But I do like a beautifully crafted small-batch spirit. And it has always narked me that most of the cash I spend on beautifully crafted small-batch spirit goes to marketeers, middlemen, Tesco shareholders, Bezos’s alimony payments, etc - as opposed to the talented hardworking people who actually create this valuable stuff.
So I rather like the model offered by SOCIALLY SPIRITED.
It’s a new small-batch spiritual enterprise set up by Jamie Isenwater. Like me, Jamie is a bit fed up of the way the people who put their hearts and souls into these liquids end up with their profits squeezed like so many limes in a busy cantina. As a rough and ready example, if you buy a £38 bottle of craft gin in BIG SUPERMARKET, approx 5% of your cash will drip down to the producer whereas BIG SUPERMARKET siphons off about 30%. Hmph.
Jamie is also - as it turns out - a long-time Spirits subscriber and very much down with my core philosophy of keeping it simple and concentrating on the core spirits. So, Socially Spirited has spent a couple of years touring spirits producers and putting together a capsule collection of eight essential bottles that are the cornerstones of any good homebar. There’s gin, Italian vermouth, a Campari-esque bitter aperitivo, light rum, vodka, orange liqueur, coffee liqueur and aromatic bitters.
(There are a couple more on the way, I’m told… almost eerily matching the initial 12 bottles I recommend as a basic cabinet).
All these liquids are sourced from well-established family distilleries around Europe, Africa and the Caribbean and bottled exclusively for Socially Spirited. I’ve tried them and they’re really good. The Umbrella Gin is just a great example of a high-defintion London dry, plenty of juniper and citrus, perfect in a Martini. The Campari dupe, Pic-Amar, is somehow more Campari than Campari, bracingly bitter but with a cleaner, brighter finish than its anagrammatic namesake. Honestly it’s made me rethink my relationship with Campari. The Caelestiale vermouth (made by a fifth-gen Italian vermouth dynasty!) is lovely and rich and warming, the ideal cocktail vermouth in fact, and something of a steal compared to your Antica Formulae.
I’m also a fan of the Spanish Orancia triple sec, which is rich, warming, faintly sherberty orange liqueur that I find a lot easier to mix with than Cointreau. And there are the other ones too! (And here’s a million things to do with the coffee liqueur). The labels, moreover, are gorgeous and will look extremely handsome on your shelf.
Anyway. I’m selling them through this link. I get a cut, yes. But given that I’m often asked for bottle recommendations (and I have done quite a lot of unpaid marketing for big cocktail over the years…) well, I hope no one minds this flagrant mercantilism.
As an introductory offer for the month of September, Socially Spirited are offering 20% off the Negroni Bundle - that’s gin, Italian vermouth and Pic-Amar - with free P&P. You just need to use the links in this message and enter the code NEGRONI20RICHARD at checkout. So that’s three super-chic bottles for £64.76. By my calculation, that will make you 28 Negronis at £2.31 each which as we know is about what a crap beer costs these days.
That’s it. End of sell. I’ll pop a discreet link into future newsletters for the next moment you run out of gin. Otherwise I’ll stick to recipes, playlists and extra-cocktail musings.
But considering it’s Negroni Week (which I hadn’t realised was actually a Slow Food initiative), here’s a few Negroni-esque things I’ve whipped up over the years that you might like to make to celebrate.
Other than that, see you on FRIDAY at the usual hour. It will not astonish you that the shopping list is gin, Italian vermouth, red Italian bitter aperitivo.
Richard x
Unfortunately I can’t order this bundle here in the States.
What a virtual happy hour for me.