What did you do before creating your gin? There’s 3 of us - Beka, Kote and Giorgi. Beka and Kote are architects and Giorgi manages a wine chateau in Kakheti, Georgia. Before deciding to create Malamo, we met through a project we were working on together, as architects and the client. We became friends and ended up creating Malamo. What made you decide to create Malamo Gin, and what's the inspiration behind it? We all love gin and at some point we realised that there was no Georgian gin brand. Well, there were some small ones, but mostly of low quality - none of them were consistent, nor interesting. The inspiration was to reflect on gin’s medical origins.
What is the meaning and story behind your brand and the Malamo name? We translated the above-mentioned inspiration into the brand identity and built the whole concept around medical aesthetics, having Medea - the mythical Colchian sorceress and the woman to whom the creation of medicine is linked - depicted on the label. The name has the same story - the word Malamo (Georgian “მალამო”) means ointment in Georgian. There’s a common way of describing a good drink in Georgia, saying it’s like an ointment for your heart - therefore, the naming is very catchy for local consumers, and fairly easy to pronounce/remember for non-Georgian speakers. Can you tell us more about the distillery your work with? Currently we don’t own a distillery (just yet!) and we’re sub-contracting the distillation process. We tested different contractors and settled on this one because they allowed us to experiment as much as we liked and the end product was very good. They have a classic pot still which is to be thanked for the complexity of our gin.
Can you tell us more about your distillation process? We macerate the botanicals separately, in different combinations and don’t keep all of them in the still during distillation. What is your ambition for Malamo in the years to come? We’re working on setting up our own distillery and hopefully we’ll be ready by the summer of 2024. As for the brand, our main goal is to increase our exposure and reach more and more gin lovers, not only locally but abroad too. We have some exciting news coming up and another direction we’re working on is growing/foraging all our botanicals locally, especially juniper which is quite common in the Georgian mountains. We’re also receiving orders from foreign markets, which is way more than we could have dreamt of within 6 months from launch.
What are your favourite ways to drink your gin/s?
We usually have it on the rocks with some lavender or rosemary from Kote’s garden, or our favourite G&T - Malamo with London Essence Co's Grapefruit & Rosemary Tonic Water. Desert Island Gins: Which 3 gins would you take with you (other than your own) and why? 3 bottles of Monkey 47! You Might Also Like...
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