It was an amazing bar. The kind of bar you write down the name of. But when the Negroni arrived it wasn't the Negroni I'd hoped for — and I sat with it for a while, looking at the bottles behind the bartender, thinking what would have to change for that drink to be exactly what I wanted.

By the time I'd finished it, the answer had become uncomfortably simple. Everything around the drink was epic — the glassware, the stamped ice, the garnish, the room, the theatre of it all. But the Negroni itself lacked complexity and depth; the kind of depth you only get from barrel-aging. The gap became obvious. On one side: sugary RTDs made for convenience. On the other: top-end cocktails served in guide-listed bars. Almost nothing sat in between.

I flew home and decided to make the Negroni I wished they'd poured.

While the first batch aged, the rest of Kai Rosso took shape: the logo, the identity, the bottle, the corks, the shrink seal. Every element was considered, then refined, until it felt worthy of what the bottle would hold.

I'd been making cocktails for a decade before any of this. A lot of it started in Dubai, where good drinks aren't exactly easy to come by. I ended up buying my own bar mostly because I wanted to get people out of the kitchen during parties at home, so I had a Lebanese carpenter build one from a pretty rough, back-of-a-napkin drawing. That was in 2003, and the same bar has since moved with me from Dubai to Germany, to Malaysia, back to Germany, then to South Africa, to Japan, and now to Mexico.

Over time, that bar pulled me deeper into the rest of it: the kit, the recipes, the use of smoke and fire, the obsession with what happens between a drink leaving the bottle, reaching the glass, and finally being enjoyed.

My Negroni is the only one of those cocktails I felt strongly enough about to bottle.

Every cocktail I've made worth remembering has had fire or smoke in it somewhere. Not as theatre — because heat changes things nothing else can. A torched rosemary sprig. A smoked rim. A flamed orange peel. The right amount, on the right surface, opens flavours that weren't there a second before.

Kai Rosso is no different. The barrel is hand-made, small, and charred inside before it ever sees a drop of Negroni. The char gives the oak its character.

If you ever come over and there's a bottle open, I'll show you the barrel. It sits in the corner of my bar, doing one job slowly: giving my Negroni depth. With one ingredient only: time.