The Captain is back
The Captain is back
For six years, nothing.
No dispatches, no position, no weather. A gin existed, eleven hundred bottles of it, each one painted by hand, and then in March 2020 the world shut its ports and the log simply stopped. That is what happens to a project whose entire premise is movement when movement becomes illegal.
Then, in the spring of 2026, the telegraph started working again.
He was off the Dalmatian coast. Scirocco dropping. Bottle open: yes.
Who he is
The Captain was born in Capodistria in 1972, in a border city that in Slovenian is called Koper, between the sea and the Istrian hills, at a moment when the line between Italy and Yugoslavia ran through the middle of everything including families.
He spent his twenties and thirties on Mediterranean cargo ships. Marseille, Piraeus, Alexandria, Barcelona. A different gin in every port, which is how a man with time on his hands turns a habit into an education. In a pub in Southampton he met Plymouth Gin and understood that a spirit could carry a place.
Then two years on a container ship, deliberately, to save money for a boat of his own. In 2012 he found her in Trieste and named her Kooper, after the town he was born in, and moved aboard. The Mediterranean became the house and the ports became rooms in it.
In 2014, at the Barcolana in Trieste, he met a distiller called Andrea Gallottini. They talked all night. What came out of that night was a question rather than a plan: could you make a gin that tastes of the Adriatic specifically, of Italian botanicals, of the particular condition of living on a border?
Four years of research later, in Alonte, the first batch was ready. Eleven hundred bottles. Six botanicals gathered along the Adriatic coast and up into the Apennines. Forty-two degrees, unfiltered, undiluted, and every bottle painted by hand so that no two leave alike.
He is, as his own biography puts it, a distiller by accident. A sailor and a dreamer on purpose.
What we had to build
A returning character is easy to announce and almost impossible to make credible. Anyone can write "he's back" on a homepage. The reader's next thought is always the same, and it is fatal: is he though.
So the brief resolved into one requirement. The Captain's return has to be checkable.
The site is not a regular one. It is a newspaper he files to. “Giornale di Bordo”. Masthead, front page, today's news. A man who has been away six years does not post content. He files dispatches, and the structure of the thing had to behave accordingly.
The Segnale di Bordo. Position, temperature, wind in knots, sea state, wave height, coordinates. It is the plainest-looking element on the page and it carries everything else, because it is the one thing on the site a reader can independently verify. Real position, real weather, real sea.
A narrator that writes from that The log is generated continuously out of where he actually is and what the sea is actually doing, rather than scheduled three months in advance by somebody in an office who has never been seasick. The constraint is the value: real coordinates mean real coastlines, real harbours, and the occasional boring Tuesday that no copywriter would ever invent.
Our favourite piece of the whole build is the failure state. When the signal does not arrive, the panel does not throw an error and does not quietly serve yesterday's numbers. It reports that the telegram was not received, that we hope the Captain is well, and that we will wait anxiously for tomorrow.
A brand that stays in character while its infrastructure is falling over is a brand somebody actually thought about.
The log
This is where the machinery stops being interesting and the writing takes over.
The current arc is La Rotta della Serenissima, the Captain retracing the maritime routes of the Venetian Republic. He leaves Dubrovnik, which the Venetians called Ragusa, and which he describes as the only city that could look the Serenissima in the eye. He enters the bay at Stari Grad on Hvar the way you enter a sentence written long before you were born. He works north to Trieste against the wind, and at twenty-five past five the sky over the city has not yet decided what it wants to be.
Entries open like ship's records. Position, month, wind, and then the line that tells you everything about the register the whole brand runs in.
Bottle open: yes.
That is the voice. Historically literate, unhurried, faintly amused, entirely unwilling to explain itself. Writing one good log entry is not difficult. Sustaining a man's interior life at sea across months and hundreds of entries, without it collapsing into travel writing, is the actual engineering problem on this project, and it is a harder one than the GPS.
He also exists in ink: an all-blue comic, drawn anonymously, in the tradition of the great Adriatic sea strips and openly indebted to the spirit of Hugo Pratt's pages. Plates are coming. Prose first, drawings after, which is the correct order.
And somewhere in all this, a gin
Sixty per cent of the work on this project has nothing to do with the bottle, and that is deliberate.
Capitano Kooper is a man who sails, and the gin is what he brings back. The product is the souvenir. Batch twelve is on the shelf now, which means the boat has been out eleven times before this one.
Why we took it
Most spirits briefs arrive the same way. Here is a bottle, here is a heritage story, please make it feel premium.
This one arrived inverted, and it arrived with an absence in it: a character who had stopped, and a client who wanted him to start again in a way nobody could dismiss as marketing.
You do not get many chances to build a brand whose editorial calendar is set by the wind.
"The sea does not reward those who sail afraid, but those who know how to wait for the right wind."
More projects with Andrea Gallottini
The Captain is not alone. Onymous Studios has been working with master distiller Andrea Gallottini across multiple brands and ventures, each one a different expression of his restless approach to spirits, cocktails and brand building.
Open.Ice.Enjoy. joined the game!
Brand identity, label design, website and video commercial for the ready-to-serve cocktail line launched at ProWein 2025 and Vinitaly 2025.
Liqueurs To Fly Over
Visual identity, packaging and brand storytelling for the Zanin 1895 Original Taste (FlyOver) line, where Andrea serves as product manager. Three international awards in 2026.
FAQ
Who is Capitano Kooper?
A character born from the imagination of Andrea Gallottini, master distiller and spirits industry veteran since 1993. The name was inspired by Capodistria, Koper in Slovenian, the Adriatic border town where the idea of creating an artisanal gin first took shape during a sailing trip with friends. The Captain is the narrative voice behind the brand: a sailor, a dreamer, and a distiller by accident.
What is GinKooper?
An Italian artisanal gin distilled in Alonte (Vicenza) from six botanicals sourced along the Adriatic coast and into the Apennines: juniper, orange, coriander, Florentine iris, wormwood and gentian. 42% vol, 50cl, unfiltered and undiluted, with each bottle hand-painted so that no two are alike. Production is limited to around 1,100 bottles per batch. Currently on batch twelve. There is also an AmaroKooper, whose secret ingredient is the same juniper distillate used for the gin.
Who is Andrea Gallottini?
A master distiller with over 30 years of experience in the spirits industry, working across production, product development and brand creation. Besides Capitano Kooper, he is behind Open.Ice.Enjoy, the ready-to-serve cocktail brand also developed with Onymous Studios, and collaborates with Distilleria Zanin 1895 as product manager.
What did Onymous Studios build for Capitano Kooper?
Onymous Studios brought the project back after a six-year silence caused by the pandemic. The work included: brand narrative and voice, the site architecture conceived as a ship's log (Giornale di Bordo), the GPS and AI pipeline behind the Segnale di Bordo and Diario di Bordo, the visual identity of the comic strip, and ongoing content production.
How does the GPS narrative system work?
The Captain's real position, together with live sea and weather conditions, feeds an AI pipeline that generates the log entries from where he genuinely is — rather than from a content calendar written in advance. When the signal does not arrive, the system stays in character: it reports that the telegram was not received and that we hope the Captain is well.
What is the Rotta della Serenissima?
The current narrative arc, in which the Captain retraces the maritime routes of the Venetian Republic along the Dalmatian coast — from Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and Stari Grad (Hvar) north to Trieste.
Is this part of a larger creative partnership?
Yes. Capitano Kooper is one of three projects Onymous Studios has developed with Andrea Gallottini. The others are Open.Ice.Enjoy (brand relaunch for ProWein and Vinitaly 2025) and the Gallottini.it e-commerce platform. The continuity of the partnership shapes the depth of the work.
Can Onymous Studios build a narrative system like this for our brand?
Yes, on one condition. There has to be something real underneath to track. Contact studios@onymous.it.