How WXC Became the World's Best Flavoured Whisky Or: what happens when you actually taste the sample in the dirty glass

The Coffee-Stained Beginning

The early days of Woven were threadbare. Building a studio. Endless outreach to suppliers as an unproven blender. Coffee-fuelled everything.

We set up in an old biscuit factory in Leith. The town that perfected whisky blending nearly 200 years ago. Before our studio filled with the aroma of whisky, it was always coffee. Days started with a pour-over. Essential fuel for a startup whisky company.

Samples would arrive a few times a week and we'd down tools, eager to taste them. I vividly remember one that had clearly been poured into a glass that previously held that morning's coffee.

We laughed at the incompetence of our situation. Then someone said it was actually delicious. We joked that we should "just do that."

The Popup That Changed Everything

A year later, Cairngorm Coffee posted that Edinburgh Council had barricaded their entire frontage. New bike lanes. No street presence. A rally cry for support.

We'd been running open studio events monthly that had outgrown our studio. We agreed on a one-night popup where the coffee shop would transform into a whisky cocktail bar.

In the one meeting we had about the event, we discussed the crossover flavours that show up in both coffee and whisky. Caramel. Chocolate. Citrus. Stone fruit. We got excited and made a coffee-whisky hybrid for the party goody bags.

We served whisky-espresso tonics. We gave about a hundred bottles of "Nothing to See Here" away. For the next week it was all anyone talked about.

The seed was planted.

Finding the Right Partners

Fast forward six months. We're at the Whisky Show in London. Claire Wallace, Head of Quality at Assembly Coffee, approaches the stand. They're the official coffee partner.

Her and Pete hit it off. The project moves from Frankenstein proof of concept to two experts discussing a potential collaboration.

Samples fly up and down between Scotland and London. A few visits later, we arrive at Batch 1 of WXC. 500 bottles. Gone instantly.

Batch 2. Batch 3. The coffee world is going crazy for it. WXC becomes a minor sensation. Alice Lascelles in the FT calls it out as one of the best gifts for Christmas.

We enter it in the World Whisky Awards. It wins the Scotland round. Hillarious, since you can't actually make flavoured whisky in Scotland. Thankfully, we labelled it correclty as a 'spirit drink'. 

Then yesterday it won the world's best flavoured whisky.

Why Assembly

We knew Assembly were the right partner as soon as we Googled them.

"We believe that collaboration is the route to creativity."

We couldn't agree more. WXC is the proof.

Claire brought precision, expertise, and rigour to the coffee side. Pete brought the same to the whisky. The product is what happens when two experts trust each other enough to break their own rules and work without ego. 

What WXC Proves

There's no grand concept here. No category to invent. Just something delicious that shouldn't exist but does.

But it is also the drink for right now. Flavoured whisky is the fastest growing subcategory of whisky worldwide. It now represents 24% of all whisky sold in the US. Next-gen whisky consumers don't care about rigid rules or category tropes. They want interesting flavours with craft stories. Taste and experience are the main drivers.

WXC delivers both.

We talk about pushing boundaries in whisky. Blending across borders. But those borders also include pushing whisky out of its comfort zone. Whisky and coffee share so many similarities when you think about it. Origin stories. Process stories. Flavour language. Rituals. Rules, for better or worse.

WXC has been the meeting of two minds, two companies, two worlds, two communities.

Proof that collaboration makes magic.

Proof there's appetite for new ideas within whisky.

What Happens Next

WXC Batch 4 lands soon. We're already working on what comes after that with Assembly.

The award is vindication. But the real proof has always been watching people taste it for the first time. The surprise. The second sip. The "wait, what is this?"

That reaction started in a dirty glass in 2021.

Now it's 'officially' the best flavoured whisky in the world.

Turns out we weren't joking.