Featured Artisan: Amázzoni Gin

About

The story of Am á zzoni starts with two artists: Alexandre, the Brazilian, and Arturo, the Italian. These two artists embarked upon a creative project that soon evolved into a great ambition: to create Brazil’s first truly craft, truly premium gin. Culturally, Brazil is the land of cacha ç a. In fact, until recently the only gins available in all of Brazil were the big name imported brands. Gin was, at best, an afterthought to most drinkers. But Alexandre and Arturo had a different idea. They had fallen under the spell of gin but they were not content to simply imitate the standard-bearing British gins that are ubiquitous the world over. No, they wanted to imbue their gin with its own heritage, taste, and verve. They sought to craft a gin that would satisfy their aesthetic tastes and desires, that would balance the complementary forces of tradition and creation, and that would truly evoke its place of origin: Brazil. Their gin that would both live up to classic gin standards but also exceed them by bringing something wholly fresh and new to gin, something worth seeking out, something worth sharing. The two artists spent many months experimenting with different blends of botanicals, and attending to the alchemy of distillation, the “spiritual process” as Arturo describes it. Finally, with the highest standards of quality, purity, and taste, they arrived on a gin that married old world and new with a combination and balance of botanicals that they deemed worthy of becoming Brazil’s first craft gin. Am á zzoni starts with classic gin botanicals familiar to any gin drinker’s palate, among them juniper, lemon peel, and laurel. It marries these with new, never-before-used-in-gin ingredients, one from each of Brazil’s five regions. These ingredients evoke the abundance, vitality, and exceptionality of Brazil: cocoa nut, Brazil nut, maxixe (a type of cucumber), clove-vine, and Victoria regia, the water lily’s seed. A nearly overnight success, Am á zzoni turned heads, captur