These are obviously hydrosols. Grove 42 is orangeyish. Garden 108 is herb and cucumber. Spice 94 is spiced, although dominated by clove. There’s a very mild acidity to the first two. Actually, “mild” is a good general descriptor for all three: these have about as much flavor intensity as those lightly flavored seltzers. They taste pretty much like water that something has been floating in. For someone accustomed to the intensity of spirits, this intensity gap is a bit hard to adjust to.
Cute labels. Too cute. The bottle doesn’t pour worth a damn. At around $35 for 70cl, that’s some expensive water!
Made a “Margarita” with 2 oz Grove 42, 1/2 oz lime juice, and a bit of syrup. Tastes a bit like limeade with a touch of orange flower water. Hmm.
I was hoping to dive into this non-alcoholic spirit thing when my wife was pregnant but it turned out she had gestational diabetes so we quickly gave up on the idea.
My biggest complaint with Seedlip is texture. It’s so thin on the palate. Oddly enough (or not…) the best results are when it’s mixed with… spirits and used as just another cocktail ingredient.
Aecorn, their aperitivo range, may work better as substitutes for vermouths and red bitters, but don’t take my word – I’ve only tasted them straight once and never played with them.
Of the bunch I’ve tasted so far the only one I’ve really enjoyed (in Spritz-like serves) is Everleaf. I think it’s a nice, flavour-packed product.
My stance on non-alcoholic cocktails and spirits, which I’ve grown less and less shy about expression, is that they just aren’t any good. I haven’t had a single one I’ve liked. Moreover, they are not cocktails and spirits at all and shouldn’t be called that; they are soft-drinks. I rather resent the appropriation of the terminology.
Water can be a distillate too, when distilled from salt water, but I’m not going to pay $35 a bottle for a fancy bottle of from Diageo, no matter how cute the label. I’m sorry-not-sorry but I’m with Robert on this one. Generally, I’m fairly sanguine about the silliness of such things, but lately the appropriation of science words by companies that know they’re being disingenuous is really chapping my ass.
To my knowledge, Seedlip never uses the word hydrosol; instead, they seem cagey about what is in the bottle, and that’s a different flavor of dubious.
It’s easy for us booze drinkers to be dismissive of non-alcoholic drinks, but there is a real need even if it’s not really being met satisfactorily. A non-drinker wants something that tastes good and where they can feel they’re included and not stuck holding a glass of something juvenile.
The gold standard, as far as I know, is the non-alcoholic menu at Existing Conditions. Those booze-free drinks are sophisticated and tasty, if eye-bugging expensive. They’re also not make-at-home.
The best luck I have had is with shrubs—those bring booze-level flavor intensity, some complex flavors and aromatics (mainly from the vinegar), and usually a bit of color. The limitation of shrubs is that they inevitably taste like shrub.
There’s a vast trove of temperance drink recipes from back in the 19th and early 20th Century—I probably ought to give them a serious look.
I’d thought a great deal about this back in SF when I had a good friend who, for a time, also couldn’t drink for medical reasons. Coming up with a decent substitute is a very complex problem, and as there were almost no options on the market at the time, I never came up with an effective solution and soon got distracted by something else once his course of medication completed.
Which part of a cocktail is the most important to you (and her)? Is it the raw bite of the alcohol or the conversion of an undrinkable flavor into something pleasant? A very strong and complex flavor over a short period of time? A temperature at or below the freezing point of water? The variety of options? The ritual of preparation? The inherent “specialness” of something with a built-in drinking “speed limit” (through either dosage, taste or cost)?
I don’t know of anything that can neatly and completely substitute for the mechanical, chemical, gustatory or physiological effects of ethanol. I’d started thinking that maybe focusing on one or two of those elements might possibly work.
In any case, to be a truly satisfying experience, it can’t just be a substitute. I would think it would need to be a unique experience of it’s own.
Great questions John. And Martin, thank you for insisting on this point. As someone who spent the greater part of a decade pregnant or nursing, there have been great swaths of my life when alcohol was just not an option. But beyond that, it is a fact that many women cant consume the same levels of alcohol as many men. So yes, I want good grown-up no-abv and low-abv options everywhere all the time — with some combination of the options John lists. I want that for all of us, whatever gender, medical situation or lifestyle decision. But I still would like to reserve some crankiness for the way the terms “distilled“ and “spirit” are being used for infused water products. As consumer I always want to press companies to move away from that sort of obfuscation. Harumph
This stuff is called Monday “Zero Alcohol Gin”. It appears to have such a high essential oil content that it is hazy in appearance. This product appears to be compounded rather than distilled. They’re using Xantham and Locust Bean Gum to give it body (which is evident), and it’s flavored with juniper extract, coriander extract and cucumber extract. The nose has some juniper and plenty of cucumber. On the palate, there’s no alcohol bite (obviously) but there’s a strong juniper backbone that is just on the good side of bitter. A hint of citrus (citric acid). The ingredients also lists monk fruit extract, but I don’t know what that tastes like.
In a faux Gin & Tonic, Monday does succeed in adding the juniper character that a dry gin would contribute, and it does no harm. Alone and with tonic water, I am already more favorably impressed with this product than I am with the Seedlip products, but I haven’t tried it in anything else, yet.
I get prickly about non-alcoholic products making a big deal out of saying they’re distilled. But this one has been criticized for louching, and for tasting like flat soda, and those criticisms make me throw up my hands. You cant win for trying as we used to say somewhat nonsensically. It seems we’ve come full circle to the types of drinks that pharmacists once served in soda fountains. What is old is new.
Giffard Bitter Syrup. For those of the SanBitter persuasion. Excellent in a highball or cocktail.
Buying aromatized water makes no sense. I love a non-alcoholic drink, but would absolutely never pay for NA ‘spirits’. Why not make some tea or tisane and spend next to nothing?
Not a “spirit”, but the Leitz Eins Zwei Zero product line is proving compelling. The Reisling does indeed taste like an off dry Reisling. The carbonated versions are pleasant.
In other news, I just poured $70 “worth” of Seedlip down the drain. Won’t be missed.
@dsoneil recently posted a tutorial video on the non-alcoholic Angostura Phosphate, a drink I barely looked twice at even though it has been included in my app for years. I had never had one before.
I have now made it. Multiple times. It is fantastic. No new-fangled “spirits” required.
You’re right! I just ran the numbers and it works out to 2% ABV (less if you add more carbonated water), or more relevantly, around 1/10 oz of actual alcohol. That isn’t quite low enough to be officially “non-alcoholic”, although it’s plenty low enough for some people’s needs.
In the context of a standard drink, the Angostura Phosphate is considered non-alcoholic, of course depending on what country you live in. It ranges from 1.2% ABV to 0.1% ABV and it should be noted that ABV is a terrible unit to measure this in, it should be measured as absolute alcohol.
A standard drink has approximately 17 to 18 ml of absolute alcohol (so 355ml of 5.0 % abv beer) and the same size non-alcoholic beer at 0.5% abv has 1.77 ml of alcohol. At 0.7% (the median point of non-alcoholic point around the world) the drink would contain 2.5 ml of alcohol.
The Angostura Phosphate contains 2.23 ml of absolute alcohol, less than a non-alcoholic beer at 0.7% (2.5 ml) and half as much as a non-alcoholic beer in Europe (1.2% abv) which would be 4.26 ml.
All excellent points, and I think most people looking for N/A drinks wouldn’t care. I just made my picky comment, like the person watching a space movie complaining that “explosions don’t go Boom in a vacuum,” because I remember a bartender friend telling me years ago about how he used to make Ango drinks for people in recovery until a customer got very upset with him upon learning that Angostura was so high in alcohol. I’m a humanitites academic, not a food scientist, but that story made me think about the way I describe at least the drinks I make as “non-alcoholic.”
Oh excellent!! Can’t wait to make this. Was just bemoaning the fact that, in the midst of all of garbage N/A products floating in the market right now, we still have a serious dearth of solid, 1%-3% ABV drinks to choose from.
