A gin company’s first whisky, named after a Himalayan peak.

Kamet is an Indian single malt whisky from Peak Spirits, a company co-founded by Ansh Khanna. The Indian drinks site Tulleeho reported its arrival in March 2021, filing it under brand launches and describing Kamet as the company’s first whisky. In June 2021 the drinks blog High On Wines called it the latest entrant among Indian single malts. Skurnik Wines & Spirits, which carries Kamet in the United States, describes Peak Spirits as run by the Mumbai-based Khanna and the Chicago-based sommelier Ken Fredrickson; Tulleeho introduced Fredrickson as Khanna’s partner and a Himalayan enthusiast.

Before the whisky, Peak Spirits made gin. Tulleeho reported that the company had already released two gins under the Jin Jiji name — one made with cashew and one from Darjeeling — and that those gins were sold only in international markets, while Kamet went on sale in Goa. Khanna told the site that the team had been working on the single malt well before Jin Jiji, and that the years whisky needs in the cask made its road to market longer; Tulleeho dated the start of that work to around 2016.

The name is taken from Mount Kamet, a 7,756-metre peak in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand. English Wikipedia describes it as the second-highest mountain in the Garhwal region after Nanda Devi and records its first ascent on 21 June 1931, by an expedition that included Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton. Smythe linked the name to the Tibetan “Kangmed,” meaning “the lower snows,” as distinct from the higher snows of the Kailash range, while Charles Meade gave the Tibetan name as “Kangmen,” Wikipedia says. Wikipedia also notes the “glacier fire” allusion, after the red glow of the mountain’s sunlit rock and ice at dawn and dusk — an image the brand’s own website returns to when it describes the peak, writing of copper-coloured rock and glaciers lit as if by flames.

Made at Indri, blended by two hands.

Peak Spirits does not run its own distillery. Skurnik says Kamet is distilled at Piccadily’s Indri distillery in Haryana, on pot stills installed there in 2012, and that Piccadily’s own cooperage chars, assembles and repairs the casks. Tulleeho described the whisky as a joint venture with the Piccadily distillery, made near Kurukshetra; Skurnik frames it as a joint venture between Peak Spirits and the blender Surrinder Kumar. The same distillery makes Piccadily’s own Indri single malts.

Two blenders are named. Surrinder Kumar spent more than three decades at Amrut Distilleries, Tulleeho reported, and Skurnik credits him with building Amrut’s single-malt programme before he became master blender for Piccadily. Nancy Fraley is a whiskey and rum blender based in Berkeley, California, whom Tulleeho described as director of education at the American Distilling Institute. The brand’s own website credits the blending to Fraley and says it follows a Kamet “philosophy” of wine influence.

The recipe, as the company and its importer describe it, starts with six-row barley grown in the Himalayan foothills. The spirit is distilled twice in copper pot stills and matured in a mix of ex-bourbon American oak, ex-wine French oak and ex-sherry casks, which the website specifies as Pedro Ximénez and oloroso. The website says the whisky is non-chill filtered, with no added colour. High On Wines added in 2021 that it was fermented with a French yeast and finished in casks that had held red Bordeaux. Its bottling strength is reported in two ways: the June 2021 review gave 42.8 per cent, while Skurnik and US retailers list 46 per cent.

Asian craft spirits.

The six brands in this group are all spirits from Asia: Omar, Godawan, Kamet, Solan Gold, Three Societies and Kiyomi. Five are whisky names, from Taiwan, India and South Korea, and one is a rum from Okinawa. Spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small independent distilleries to labels that belong to much larger drinks groups or state-linked companies, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a duty-free shelf to a bar list abroad.

A spirits brand’s identity is usually carried less by the liquid than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands or names, sourced its grain or cane from elsewhere, or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirit is actually distilled, matured and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A sacred parrot rather than a mountain.

For a whisky named after a mountain, Kamet puts a bird at the centre of its identity. The brand’s website calls a sacred parrot “our brand icon,” and says it pays homage to the culture of the villages around the distillery, where, the company says, parrots are considered sacred and are thought of as fortune tellers. It ties the bird to the stories and legends of the region and to the values it wants to stand for: hard work, loyalty to the community and thanks for the land’s natural resources. Tulleeho likewise linked the parrot on the label to Indian folklore and to village life near the distillery, and Skurnik says the parrot represents the fertile plains that give the brand its name. Reviewing the bottle in June 2021, High On Wines praised its packaging and its use of local Indian motifs.

The website’s second theme is national. Under the heading “Made in India,” it says the company is proud of its Indian identity and values and wants to represent them around the world. Kamet was distilled in Haryana and, Tulleeho reported, sold first in Goa, while the company’s gins had been sold only abroad.

For a design guide, Kamet shows how a young brand can borrow a mountain for its name and a local bird for its face, and keep both distinct. Compare Indri, made at the same Haryana distillery, and Amrut, where Surrinder Kumar built a single-malt programme. For this guide we use parrot green, copper and glacier white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kamet’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.