Monica Berg on Rethinking Whisky, Cocktails, and Culture
The world’s most influential bartender wants us to stop guarding spirits and start opening doors
Monica Berg doesn’t talk about cocktails as recipes. Instead, she talks about them as ideas. Sitting across from her in Mumbai, it’s striking how rarely she slips into the language of measurements and methods. Instead, she circles back to curiosity, culture, and perspective—the forces that, in her mind, truly shape the way we drink.
Berg has built her reputation on that approach. Norwegian by birth, London-based by practice, she is the co-owner of Tayēr + Elementary, widely considered one of the most forward-thinking bars in the world. She’s been named Best International Bartender, awarded the Altos Bartenders’ Bartender Award, and in 2023 was recognised as the most influential person in the global bar world. Her influence extends beyond drinks menus: she co-founded the non-profit P(our), co-created Back of House, a digital platform for hospitality workers, and launched Muyu, her own line of liqueurs. To describe her as a bartender almost undersells her; she is closer to a cultural strategist whose medium happens to be spirits.
So, it’s no surprise that she has spent much of her career dismantling orthodoxy in the drinks world. And that’s probably also why Johnnie Walker Black Label tapped her for One Step Further – its new programme reframing the iconic whisky through cocktails, moving away from neat serves. For a brand so entrenched in tradition, the move signals a calculated shift. For Berg, it’s an affirmation of something she has been saying all along: whisky’s future depends on letting go of how it has always been consumed.
“For a long time it was considered that once [whisky is] in the bottle, that’s where it stops. And then the only next step is to take and drink it neat, or maybe with some ice, but do very little to interfere with the actual product,” she says. “I think now the new generation is saying, there’s been a lot of innovation, there’s been a lot of technology advances, so now the spirits are much higher quality than they were in the past. So, it’s not about hiding what is there—it’s about highlighting what is already there. But it’s about making it personal.”
That word—personal—runs through much of Berg’s approach. Whisky, she insists, doesn’t belong to tradition alone. It belongs to flavour, and to the preferences of the person drinking it. “You and me probably don’t like to drink the same things for different reasons,” she says. “But we can both like Johnnie Walker Black Label—you like it in a certain way, I like it in a certain way. And that’s the beauty of mixology.”
The Purity Problem
Ask Berg why this matters and she begins with the obvious: neat whisky is not for everyone. “If you only recruit people who can drink whisky neat at 25, you’ll recruit very few new drinkers,” she says. It’s not a dismissal of tradition so much as a sober assessment of reality. For many first-time drinkers, whisky neat is harsh, intimidating, even alienating. But in a cocktail—a Whisky Sour, a Rob Roy—the same spirit becomes accessible, layered, and open to interpretation.
That distinction, for Berg, is crucial. Spirits are not sacred objects to be guarded; they are agricultural products—rooted in grain, season, and geography. Treating them as untouchable relics, she argues, freezes them in time. “Rather than be the gatekeeper,” she says, “why not be the door opener?”
Her own family reflects this spectrum. “My grandmother, for example, she doesn’t drink hardly any alcohol, but if she drinks, she drinks a whisky highball. But it’s proportion one part whisky to nine parts water. Because that’s when she likes the flavour,” Berg says with a shrug. “So I would disagree that it’s only supposed to be drunk neat because then you’re going to end up with a product that will die out. Rather than be the gatekeeper, you can be the door opener and allow this new generation to enjoy the same things you enjoy—but in the way that they enjoy it.”
A Game Of Flavours
Her India debut was built around four flavour “territories”: Spicy, Fresh, Fruity, and Coffee. They became the framework for new Black Label cocktails. But even here, the approach was pragmatic rather than prescriptive. “I taste it, and I try to understand what I’m tasting, and I try to say, how can I take these elements that I find here and add them back, and then just highlight what I already find there and make sure that it’s enjoyable,” she says. “The aim is always to make a delicious cocktail. But obviously I also want to have a variety because I want to showcase that there’s different moments in life that you can enjoy these cocktails.”
In one instance, that process led her straight into India’s flavour lexicon. “Apparently I made, without knowing it and without ever having been here before, a drink that is very similar to a sweet banana and cardamom you get in Kerala,” she says. “I was doing a lot of research about ingredients, and I decided that I wanted to work with green cardamom… and it turned out to echo flavours that are already so familiar here.”
On The Bar Scene Flux In India
For Berg, India’s cocktail culture feels like it’s on the verge of something bigger. “From what I understand, it’s fairly new, this cocktail movement,” she says. “But I think it’s a culture that is very built on being social, so that’s always a good starting point. It has all of the pieces of the puzzle to be very successful—you have the manpower, you have the people, you have the ingredients, you have the knowledge.”
What she recognises is a cycle familiar to many bar scenes worldwide. “First you look outwards, and then by looking outwards you have the people that go out and work, they come back and they set up things themselves, and then they help the rest of the community,” she says. “Together they start to build something that in a few years will be super successful—but it will be more like a reflection of India as well.”
The local advantage, she insists, lies in produce. “Everyone else is envious about what you can have. A lot of people will be super jealous about all the things that you could do if you were here. But sometimes you don’t see the forest for the trees.”
Restlessness As A Method
Part of what sustains Berg’s own creativity is her refusal to stay within the lane of bartending. “We always say to our team that if you want to be a good bartender, you should go out and do anything but bartending,” she says. “Go to a gallery, go to the park, go learn how to do other things. Especially if something makes me really uncomfortable, I’ll probably go and try it until it doesn’t make me uncomfortable.”
Her experiments range widely. “I tried bonsai cutting—this is not my thing, I’m very impatient. I tried to make jewellery. I tried to make skincare, which is my thing, and everything that is around perfumery,” she says. “This always keeps me adding new layers to how I make cocktails.”
Breaking Whisky’s Gender Code
The gendered baggage of whisky, especially in India, isn’t lost on her. For decades, it has been coded as a masculine spirit. Berg believes cocktails can help dismantle that. “I think maybe it has the potential to do it, because in my experience a lot of these whisky cocktails are very popular with women, and women are actually much more open-minded to try new things,” she says.
That willingness, she argues, has been overlooked by the industry. “It’s very misconstrued to say that the whisky drinker in 2025 is a man of a certain age,” she notes. “If you actually went out and looked in a bar it would be a lot of women. And I think that’s where they’ve struggled a little bit—because if you’re speaking to the wrong audience then it doesn’t matter what you’re saying, they will never listen to you.”
The Shift Shead
In the end, Berg’s perspective on whisky is less about rebellion than it is about evolution. Cocktails aren’t a betrayal of tradition; they’re an expansion of it. “We’ve been trained and taught that we can have anything, anywhere, everywhere, all the time,” she says. “So cocktails, I think, are a natural extension of whisky.”
That extension is already underway in India’s bars, where younger bartenders are experimenting with regional ingredients and rethinking flavour in ways that echo Berg’s own philosophy. Her presence here only accelerates that process. If whisky once insisted on neat pours, Berg’s message is simple: that was just one step. The next is already happening.