Gnista founder Erika knows a thing or two about flavor, is virtually at home in the kitchen, and can look back on almost 20 years in the food scene. However, the enthusiastic and experimental collector of wild herbs and plants had no experience in the production of spirits before the emergence of Gnista. We think: you don’t have to know everything, but you have to know how to help yourself. And knowing that you don’t know something is half the battle. Questions so far? In any case, Erika has expanded her own expertise with that of various mixologists and together they developed Gnista. As with any delicious meal, everything stands and falls with the quality of the ingredients, the composition and balance.
Rhubarb brings natural acidity, oak the tannins and raisins provide sweetness. Ginger, black vin linh pepper and habanero are responsible for the bite, and beet syrup gives the often-missed body to the non-alcoholic spirits and serves as a flavor carrier, also because it is fantastic for smoking. Vermouth adds bitters, and various botanicals like lovage provide the unique character.
And because the whole is always more than the sum of its individual parts, the last step in the production process is particularly important: blending. The individual ingredients react with each other and are also subject to normal fluctuations, for example in acidity or sugar content, depending on the season. Master blender Frederik reconciles these natural differences in each batch to enable an approximation of a constant flavor profile.