Pizza, Chili, and Scotch: How Woven Whisky and Civerinos Flipped the Script on Collaboration
In a city whose port district once served as the beating heart of the global Scotch blending trade, a new kind of whisky story is unfolding — one that starts not in a dunnage warehouse or a cooperage, but at a table covered in pizza grease and hot honey drizzle. Woven Whisky, the Leith-based blending outfit that has spent the better part of five years dismantling whisky's stuffiest conventions, has just released its most audacious expression yet: a limited edition spirit drink called Woven x Civerinos Hot Honey, built from the ground up around the flavor profile of chili-laced honey and bottled at a punchy 43.1% ABV.
The release is genuinely unlike anything else on the shelf right now — not because hot honey is a new concept in food and beverage, but because of the methodical, backwards-engineered creative process that produced it. This isn't a whisky with an afterthought of sweetness and spice stirred in. It's a spirit that was reverse-engineered from a food experience, constructed ingredient by ingredient to capture something specific and immediate: the burn, the bloom, the floral sweetness of quality chili honey on a charred pizza crust. That distinction matters more than it might first appear.
The Accidental Origin of a Deliberate Collaboration
A Bite That Became a Blueprint
Leith-based Woven Whisky has partnered with pizza restaurant Civerinos to launch Hot Honey, a whisky blended around the flavor profile of chili-infused honey. The genesis of that partnership, however, wasn't hatched in a boardroom. Pete Allison, co-founder and whisky maker at Woven Whisky, described how the idea began. "The best collaborations start organically. I was happily munching some Civerinos pizza in Brown's of Leith when the chef asked if I wanted to try some hot honey pizza drizzle they'd infused with our whisky," he said.
As soon as he tasted it, Allison's mind started plotting what it could become if they flipped it into a hot honey infused whisky. That moment — spontaneous, sensory, and grounded in place — is entirely on brand for what Woven has been trying to accomplish since its founding. Allison said the reversal of the brief was central to the project. "We asked Civerinos if they'd help us build a whisky around the hot honey flavour profile and after some tastebud-shedding creative sessions, we had tasted enough to understand that the concept had legs," he added.
That phrase — "tastebud-shedding" — hints at just how seriously both parties took the development process. This wasn't a one-afternoon handshake deal. The sessions required real iteration: tasting, adjusting, pushing the spice forward, pulling back, finding the precise ratio of honey sweetness to jalapeño heat that would work not just as a novelty but as a genuinely enjoyable spirit. The result — Woven x Civerinos Hot Honey — is now available for £40 (US$54) per 700ml bottle from the brand's website, Brown's of Leith, and all seven Civerinos locations across the UK.
Why Civerinos? Why Now?
Civerinos was recently named seventh best pizza in the world by Time Out magazine. That's not a throwaway credential. For an Edinburgh pizza joint to land on a global best-of list puts it squarely in conversation with institutions in Naples, New York, and Tokyo. United by Edinburgh origin and a shared obsession with flavor, Woven Whisky and Civerinos had previously collaborated on a chilli-laced honey drizzle infused with Woven Homemade whisky — an immensely popular limited edition pizza topping. So there was already a proven connection between the two brands in the marketplace, even before anyone thought about building a spirit around it.
Michele Civiera, founder of Civerinos, explained the relationship plainly: "Civerinos has always been about community, from the people we work with to the ingredients we use and the neighbourhoods our restaurants sit in. Partnering with Woven felt natural because we share the same space in Brown's of Leith, and the more we hang out and cross-pollinate, the more we realise our parallel paths of flavour obsession in pizza and whisky had potential to cross over in a fun and delicious way."
Civiera was also pointed about the nature of the collaboration itself. "This isn't a whisky with our logo slapped on it. It's a proper collaboration where both sides brought something the other couldn't do alone." That's a meaningful distinction in an era when co-branded spirits are often little more than a label change on an existing product. The difference here is in the liquid itself: Civerinos' kitchen sensibility shaped the flavor architecture, while Woven's blending expertise determined how to express that architecture in a whisky-based spirit.
What's Actually in the Bottle
The Base Spirit and the Botanicals
Woven has reimagined the collaboration as a spirit drink with an ABV of 43.1%, blending whisky with a hot honey flavour profile. The liquid is a grain whisky from the North British Distillery Company, blended with blossom honey, natural guajillo spice, and green jalapeño chillies. Each of those choices rewards a closer look.
North British is not a household name to most American whisky drinkers, but it's a cornerstone of the Scottish blending industry — a large-scale grain distillery based in Edinburgh that has quietly supplied liquid to many of Scotland's most respected blended Scotch producers for well over a century. Grain whisky from North British tends to carry lighter, cleaner grain character than a heavily peated malt, which makes it an ideal canvas for layering additional flavors without obscuring the base. In other words, the whisky won't fight the honey and the heat — it carries them.
The choice of guajillo spice is particularly interesting for American drinkers. Guajillo chiles are dried mirasol peppers, common throughout Mexican cooking, and they bring a very specific kind of heat — fruity, slightly tannic, not brutally sharp. Paired with green jalapeño, which is brighter and more vegetal than its red counterpart, the resulting spice profile should be layered rather than one-dimensional. It's a heat that builds and lingers rather than punches and fades. Combined with blossom honey — which has a lighter, more floral sweetness than darker varietal honeys like buckwheat — the formula is built for balance rather than spectacle.
The Regulatory Wrinkle: Spirit Drink, Not Whisky
Here's where things get genuinely interesting from a regulatory standpoint. In line with Scotch Whisky Association regulations, which prohibit additives other than spirit caramel, it is labelled as a 'spirit drink' rather than a whisky. This is the same framework that governs all Scotch whisky production, and it's a fence that cannot be moved. The moment you introduce honey, chili, or any flavoring beyond spirit caramel into a Scotch whisky, you've stepped outside the legal definition and into the category of "spirit drink."
That might sound like a marketing problem, but Woven's track record suggests they see it as anything but. The brand's world is built around a diverse portfolio of expressions — from Scotch-based blends to world whiskies, from Homemade and Hemispheres to Pure Malt, Superblend, Pastures New, Friends in the North, and WXC, its coffee-and-whisky spirit drink. WXC is a direct precedent here: a whisky-based coffee spirit drink that the brand has already brought to market. Woven clearly has no issue operating within the "spirit drink" label when the liquid itself justifies it.
Woven's world is not built around the usual hierarchy of single malt above blend, Scotland above everywhere else, or age statement above experience. It is built around flavor, texture, connection, curiosity, and one extremely useful guiding word: yummy. That philosophy makes Hot Honey a logical step rather than a sharp departure.
Serving It Right: Cocktails Designed for the Bottle
The Signature Serves
At its launch at Brown's of Leith, the product was premiered with two signature serves — the Hot Honey Lemonade Highball and the Hot Honey Whisky Sour — designed to resemble a spicy margarita with a distinctly Scottish twist. That framing — Scottish spirit meets spicy margarita energy — is shrewdly pitched at an American cocktail sensibility. The spicy margarita has been one of the defining cocktail trends of the past several years stateside, and building analogous serves around a Scotch-based spirit taps directly into that consumer instinct.
A Hot Honey Lemonade Highball makes immediate, intuitive sense. The carbonation opens up the floral-spice character, the citrus cuts through the honey's sweetness, and the jalapeño heat sits in the back of the throat as the bubbles dissipate. It's a drink that works on a back porch in July as well as it does on a pub table in Edinburgh in October. The Hot Honey Whisky Sour, meanwhile, plays the grain spirit's lighter profile against fresh lemon and egg white foam — a classic build that lets the blossom honey and guajillo spice do the heavy lifting.
The pizza pairing angle is also genuinely well-considered, not merely promotional. Sweet, fatty, slightly charred pizza — particularly any pie with a chili-forward topping — creates a feedback loop with hot honey in the glass. The heat builds symmetrically, the honey in the drink echoes any sweetness in the sauce, and the grain whisky base provides enough structure to cut through the fat without clashing with it. This is food-and-spirits pairing done with actual kitchen logic rather than marketing logic.
Understanding Woven: The Brand Behind the Bottle
Founded on Collaboration and Dissatisfaction with the Status Quo
Founded in 2020 by friends Pete Allison, Duncan McRae, and Nick Ravenhall, this group set out on a mission to bring blends blinking into the limelight from their studio in an old biscuit factory in Leith, Edinburgh. The choice of Leith as a home base is loaded with meaning. Once one of the busiest ports in Europe, Leith itself has a rich history of whisky blending, being a former epicentre of the industry and home to historic blends such as MacKinlay's and Bailie Nicol Jarvie.
Co-founder Duncan McRae, who oversees brand, marketing, and communications and is Australia-based, has articulated the brand's mission simply: breaking down the "nonsense about who whisky is for, how it should be enjoyed, and even how it 'should' be made." The trio met at various stages of their careers and were formally brought together at Tonbridge-based Atom Brands. All three founders describe their careers and lives as having been "punctuated by whisky," and they came to realize they shared a fascination with blending and held complementary skill sets that could make a viable business venture.
Woven launched their inaugural range of whiskies in August 2021 — and they arrived under the bracket of "blended" whisky at a moment when, in whisky culture, single malt was clearly where the excitement lived. That was a deliberate provocation. Today, blends make up 85% of the global Scotch whisky market, so it's hard to ignore the importance of the category and reasonable to expect that there should be real quality within it. Woven was making the argument — through the liquid itself — that blended Scotch deserved the same level of creative attention that single malt had been hogging for a generation.
A Studio, Not a Distillery
One thing Woven is emphatically not is a distillery. Woven is a whisky-blending studio in Leith, started by friends who wanted to change how blended whisky is made — they wanted it to be more personal, less industrial, and more enjoyable. Allison, who serves as the hands-on whisky maker for the brand, came to the role from a hospitality and drinks background rather than from production. He had never before held a hands-on production role before Woven — which is actually a credential in the context of what Woven is trying to accomplish. A blender without the instinct to defer to distillery tradition is more likely to ask disruptive questions about flavor.
Woven's base in Leith gives the whole project an immediate historical charge. Leith has a deep history in whisky blending, rectifying, warehousing, and merchant culture. The Scotch Malt Whisky Society's Vaults sit nearby. The old whisky district left its marks — port, trade, blending, and movement are all part of the neighborhood's story. For a brand that deals in blends sourced from across Scotland and beyond, that institutional memory is both a resource and a responsibility.
A Portfolio That Keeps Pushing Boundaries
Hot Honey is not the first time Woven has operated outside the conventional playbook. In March 2025, co-founder Peter Allison spoke about the challenge of creating Woven's first all-English blended whisky, saying that "every whisky we create depends on distillers entrusting us with their liquid" and that "English whisky makers have built a reputation for high-quality liquids, so creating something that lived up to the 'Made in England' label was crucial." Woven noted that creating an all-English blend was a particular challenge because there is no tradition of supplying liquids for blending as there is in Scotland.
When Woven started, it was always their intention to blend with whiskies not just from Scotland, but from right around the world — driven by the fact that their love affair with Scotch was peppered with encounters of incredible whiskies from elsewhere, from the established names in the USA and Ireland to the emerging wave of Japanese whiskies. That global sensibility is baked into the brand's DNA and makes the Hot Honey release feel less like an outlier and more like one more point on a deliberately unconventional trajectory.
The brand has also shown sustained commitment to sustainability in its packaging. Rather than the result of an exacting design process, Woven's distinctive bottle is actually a Boston round — the most common bottle in the world, essentially used for the bulk storage of medicine — made from amber glass with a recycled material content as high as 63%, and using around 30% less glass than a conventional whisky bottle of the same size. That's a packaging choice that looks cool and performs on environmental metrics simultaneously.
Hot Honey in the Wider Spirits Landscape
A Trend With Serious Momentum
The Woven x Civerinos release doesn't exist in a vacuum. Hot honey — the combination of floral sweetness and chili heat — has been migrating steadily from restaurant kitchens and pizza counters into the cocktail and spirits space for the past several years. The appeal is obvious: it delivers complexity without demanding education from the consumer. You don't need to understand Scoville units or honey varietals to appreciate the interplay of those two flavors in a glass. You just need to taste it.
The American market in particular has shown a ferocious appetite for spirits that bring heat. Spicy expressions have appeared across tequila, mezcal, vodka, and increasingly whiskey. The spicy margarita's dominance in the on-trade has proven that heat and spirits are not merely compatible — they're commercially explosive when handled correctly. The question has always been how to translate that sensibility into a Scotch-adjacent product without it feeling like a gimmick.
Woven's answer — engineer the spirit around the flavor rather than introducing flavoring as an afterthought — is the right one. The architecture matters. A whisky-forward spirit that happens to carry honey and chili is a fundamentally different proposition than a flavored spirit product that uses whisky as a carrier. The former respects the base spirit. The latter treats it as infrastructure.
Regulatory Considerations for the American Market
For those in the U.S. wondering whether they'll be able to get their hands on Hot Honey, the current retail footprint — Woven's website, Brown's of Leith, and Civerinos' seven UK locations — doesn't extend to American soil yet. The product is priced at £40 per 700ml bottle and is available from wovenwhisky.com, at Brown's of Leith and across all Civerinos locations including sites in Finnieston, Portobello, Leith, Stockbridge, Forrest Road, Hunter Square and Lost Shore. That's a robust domestic distribution network for a limited edition, but it leaves Americans in the position of either seeking it out on import or waiting to see whether Woven expands stateside distribution.
It's also worth noting that the "spirit drink" classification, while required under SWA regulations in the UK, would require its own label approval process under TTB rules in the United States. That's not an insurmountable obstacle — plenty of flavored and whisky-based spirit drinks navigate TTB approval — but it adds a layer of administrative complexity to any future U.S. launch. Given the current American appetite for both Scotch and spicy spirits, though, the commercial case for making that effort isn't hard to construct.
Why This Kind of Collaboration Points Somewhere Important
The Cross-Industry Model
The Woven x Civerinos model — two local businesses sharing physical and cultural space, building something through genuine creative exchange rather than brand licensing — represents a different and arguably more honest version of the celebrity or "influencer spirits" model that has dominated headlines for the past decade. There's no famous face attached to this bottle. There's a pizza chef who made a hot honey drizzle with a local whisky, and a whisky maker who ate that pizza and had an idea. The entire narrative arc fits on a napkin, and that's exactly why it works.
Woven sees their work as a global mission, understanding that blending is about creativity, community, and collaboration. Hot Honey is that mission made literal: two Edinburgh businesses with genuinely complementary obsessions building a product that neither could have made alone. Woven wants whisky back in spaces where bartenders respect it, use it, pour it, mix it, and reach for it — and a spirit built around one of the most recognizable flavor trends in modern dining is a smart way to get there.
Leith's Legacy, Forward-Facing
There's something almost poetic about the geography here. Woven's base in Leith gives the whole project an immediate historical charge. Leith has a deep history in whisky blending, rectifying, warehousing, and merchant culture. But Woven has never been interested in leaning on that history as a marketing crutch. As one co-founder put it, the brand "has to be forward facing as opposed to nostalgia facing." Hot Honey is exactly that: a product rooted in a neighborhood with centuries of whisky culture, but oriented entirely toward what people are eating and drinking right now.
The Scotch industry's complicated relationship with innovation is well documented. On one side, the SWA's strict production regulations preserve quality and consumer trust; on the other, they can constrain creativity in ways that push ambitious producers into adjacent categories like spirit drinks. Woven has consistently treated those constraints as creative parameters rather than obstacles. If blossom honey and guajillo spice can't legally be called Scotch whisky, then the "spirit drink" label simply becomes the honest description of something genuinely different — and potentially more interesting — than what the traditional categories offer.
Whether you're in Edinburgh or Edinburgh-adjacent only in your imagination, Woven x Civerinos Hot Honey is the kind of release that forces you to reconsider what collaboration in the spirits industry can look like. Not a licensed logo drop, not a celebrity name on a label, not a marketing stunt dressed up as a product — but two craft-minded businesses sharing a neighborhood, a sensibility, and apparently a very good pizza, working backwards from a flavor they loved toward a spirit worth drinking. That's a story worth paying £40 for, or at least worth hunting down when it eventually crosses the Atlantic.
