Heritage And Bitter Liqueurs: What Sets Khoosh And Dr. Hostetter’s Apart From The Rest

Can you share a bit about your experience and how the idea for Khoosh and Dr. Hostetter’s came about?

Rob and I come from different professional backgrounds – his in finance and mine in branding. But we discovered that we shared an interest in the idea of reviving heritage brands. Actually the route to reviving Khoosh and Dr. Hostetter’s was a circuitous one. We started out in a different category, experimenting with a medieval chandlery brand similar to Cire Trudon, but with a British history.

In the end we took the decision not to go into full production, but it was an incredible learning experience on many levels. The insights in intellectual property ownership, product development, scent creation, supply chain, working with third party experts that we took from that experience have been invaluable on our journey with Khoosh and Dr. Hostetter’s.

The pivot to focus on Khoosh and Dr. Hostetter’s was motivated by a couple of key things. Firstly, we are both passionate about spirits in general and cocktail culture in particular. Secondly, the brands themselves are just incredibly compelling. And a big part of that is their unique heritage which would be a powerful thing for a brand in any category, but which I think is particularly true in the spirits world where so many of the iconic names are either heritage brands – Jack Daniel’s, Gordon’s Gin, Absolut et al. – or put a lot of work into looking like they have heritage, like Bombay Sapphire. And thirdly, we were very interested in the bitter liqueur space and the opportunity to perhaps bring a level of disruption, or at least differentiation, to a category that has been much less influenced by the premiumisation and fragmentation that we’ve seen in many of the other major spirits categories like gin, rum, agave spirits etc. Typically there’s a lot of focus on the white or brown spirit that’s going into your drink. But the modifier, often a bitter, tends to get second billing. And we’ve been really motivated to bring two ultra-premium alternatives to the bitter liqueur category to help change that.

Why is it important to have glass packaging for your products?

One of the first things that we did on this journey was to source as many original brand artefacts as we could. We’ve managed to piece together a pretty incredible archive of original bottles, labels, recipes, promotional literature and other bits and pieces. The original Khoosh and Dr. Hostetter’s bottles that we have – some of them still full and with labels mostly intact – are just stunning. So right from the outset we knew that we wanted to be as faithful to recreating the original materials and shapes of the bottles as we could. That meant not just glass packaging, but specifically bespoke glass packaging to recreate the iconic silhouettes of the original brands.

What can you tell us about the label/design of the bottles? Khoosh has an especially colourful design.

Well, we were lucky enough to inherit a very clear design aesthetic from the original brands. Much of the core iconography – St. George slaying the dragon featured on Dr. Hostetter’s front label; or the otherworldly lady astride a tiger featured on the Khoosh front label – are lifted in large part from the originals. So the brief for the label design was more a question of craft and refinement than new concept creation.

We also had the privilege of working with Stranger & Stranger, who are probably the pre-eminent design agency for premium spirits. Although of course I’m biased, I think I can objectively say that they have created two absolutely world-class designs that we’re incredibly proud of.