🥃 How Two People Make Every Single Bottle of Faccia Brutto’s Italian Spirits

And what they are plotting next 👀

The Deligram shines a spotlight on the many incredible food artisans in New York. In our last feature, we spoke to Fort Greene-based chocolatier Yukiko Hayakawa about her health-conscious brand chocolate Noé no Omise. This week, we visited Faccio Brutto Spirits’s new space on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, where founder Patrick Miller and production manager Avery Fary were busy peeling oranges for their aperitivo and carefully measuring a bitter ingredient called aloe ferox for their fernet.

The Product: Brooklyn-made Italian-inspired spirits.
The Deligram Pick: For a long time it’s been Fernet Pianta, but the new Carciofo is also a strong contender.
How to Buy: On facciabruttospirits.com or in person at select stockists.
Price: $37-$65.

What inspired you to launch Faccia Brutto?

Patrick Miller: I was a line cook for a long time, and I opened [the restaurant] Rucola in downtown Brooklyn in 2011. Obviously, it’s a heavily Italian-influenced restaurant with lots of amari, so I started tasting the stuff and falling in love with it. In 2013, around when Brad Thomas Parsons wrote his first amaro and bitters books, I read it and started making cocktail bitters at home on my days off. That piqued my interest, plus, soon thereafter, St. Agrestis came around — they were the first company in Brooklyn to start making amaro. A couple of years later, I was burned out and thinking: what am I going to do next? Be a private chef? Or maybe make this [amaro] stuff? Thanks to bartenders, people were really enjoying bitter cocktails — at least here in Brooklyn — and it seemed like a feasible thing to try to do at the time. So, what do you do when you want to start a business? You make a pitch deck and a business plan; you budget the whole thing out; and then you try to get investors. I did that for about two years until I finally got enough money to start the process — all the while, of course, tinkering with recipes [at home]. Bartenders tried it and told me: change this; this is weird; this isn't good; this is great, go that way. When I had something serviceable, which would eventually become the Amaro Gorini, named after my grandmother, I realized I needed to make other stuff too because [amaro] ages for a few months. So then the aperitivo and the fernet came out of necessity. In July 2019, we started buying equipment, and once I got my paperwork in March 2020, I started producing around 50-gallon batches. The first batch I made all by myself, and it was a lot of work. And then slowly after Avery Fary, our production manager, who was also a line cook for a long time, came on, we were able to make larger batches. To this day, we're the only two people who make all of the products.

Half of my family is Italian, so I wanted the packaging to have a timeless, old-school feel, like it could have been imported from Italy. The bottles are from an Italian glass company called Antica Farmacia, which means ‘old pharmacy,’ so the bottle was taken care of. And then I was connected with this husband-and-wife design duo, Elizabeth Dilk and Garrett Morin of G.E.O.. I told them I wanted to honor Charles Bukowski, one of my favorite writers and a big drinker, somehow on the bottle, and they came back with the illustration of the guy. I was like, it's perfect. As for the name, one of my old chefs, his wife