Three ways to bring a spirit back to the centre of the cocktail
Some spirits do not disappear because of any flaw in the liquid itself. They fade because tastes change, markets shift and the bar rail gets repopulated by whatever fits the moment. Brandy is a useful case for reading that movement. In early mixology manuals, it appears often and in inventive forms: punches, juleps, sours and, notably, the Brandy Crusta, the nineteenth-century drink that helped establish some of the visual and structural cues still familiar in cocktail culture today. Claims of global dominance should be treated cautiously, but brandy clearly occupied a more central place in bar history than it often gets credit for now.
More than a century later, the Consejo Regulador del Brandy de Jerez, the regulatory body for the category, organised a Brandy de Jerez Cocktail Week with more than 30 venues across Madrid, Barcelona and Seville. By itself, a themed week does not rewrite a category’s reputation. Still, it offers a useful clue: not a grand revival, but a practical attempt to put the spirit back where it can actually be used, which is behind the bar.
The issue is image, not quality
Brandy de Jerez has the sort of production details that make it well suited to mixing. It matures in the criaderas y soleras system, in casks that may previously have held fino, amontillado, oloroso or Pedro Ximénez, and that process shapes its aromatic profile. Depending on the expression, it can bring saline touches, toasted notes and a range that moves between dryness and softer sweetness without losing definition. It is not simply a brandy aged in wood; it is a spirit marked by the cask history and by the way it is aged.
The harder part has been perception. In Spain, brandy was long tied to the after-lunch ritual, to an older generation and to a more formal idea of drinking. The choice to work around the Solera Reserva category seems practical: a cost level that makes sense for bars, with enough character to survive inside a cocktail instead of disappearing into it. It feels like a bar-side decision rather than a prestige exercise.
The initiative gives venues room to interpret the spirit in different ways. Some bars offer a single cocktail for the whole week, others a short dedicated list, and others a simpler serve aligned with the house style. The main moments, one in each city, include masterclasses and guest shifts with bartenders who are well known in the Spanish scene. The logic is straightforward: put the bottle in capable hands and let the drink, not the script, do the talking.
Three strategies, not one revival
The same question appears elsewhere, but the answers differ. Hampden Estate, the Jamaican distillery founded in 1753, has released Hampden Fresh, its unaged spirit. Here the move is the opposite of the Jerez brandy approach. Rather than working primarily on perception, it brings bartenders an ingredient that is already highly distinctive aromatically, with the bold ester profile and pot-still structure that define the house. It is not a neutral base spirit for background use; it is something that asks to be placed in a visible role in the recipe.
A different model is visible at Britannia Bar, the cocktail bar in Trondheim’s Britannia Hotel, where aquavit plays a prominent role on the menu. The spirit is not treated as a novelty or a shorthand for Nordic identity. Instead, it is folded into cocktails in ways that are not always immediately obvious to the guest. The spirit remains present, but it emerges gradually, inside drinks designed to be readable and appealing before they are explanatory.
These three examples do not add up to a single sector-wide comeback. What they do show is three different ways of bringing a historically loaded spirit back into contemporary cocktail culture: through institutional promotion that reframes perception, through a product release that highlights character, or through menu design that integrates the spirit into the everyday rhythm of the bar. The common thread is not a universal trend. It is the effort to make room again for spirits that still have a clear identity, if the bar is willing to use it.
