Whether you're on a health kick or a hangover just isn't quite your tipple, these booze-free brands are the ones to try. Your happy hour just got a whole lot brighter...
Alcohol-free substitutes for beer, wine and spirits used to come with a great compromise on taste. That’s not the case anymore. These days, Scandinavian innovative drinks producers are going all-in to prove that alcohol-free doesn't have to mean bland or boring.
Scandinavian beer producers like alcohol-free pioneer Mikkeller have long since proved that alcohol-free beer can be very tasty – and the alcohol-free beer category is still booming. These days, though, lots of other exciting drinks are spilling onto the market – crafted drinks with no alcoholic kick, but instead with a massive punch of flavours and technique.
We’ve found five of the most interesting ones:
Muri Drinks
“Re-imagine the wine experience” says Muri Drinks founder Murray Paterson. He used to work in the British cider industry before going to Copenhagen to hone his craft at revolutionary distiller Empirical Spirits. Then in 2020, he left to found MURI with Ioakeim Goulidis, who in turn brought experience from Noma’s Fermentation Laboratory.
As with alcoholic drinks, the starting point for Muri is fermentation. Lots of different ones. After the fermentation, Paterson blends, smokes, and infuses with foraged botanicals to create drinks with both great depth and flavour. The sparkling ’Passing Clouds’ is fermentation galore: made with quince kefir, non-alcoholic gooseberry wine and jasmine tea, along with geranium and woodruff-flavoured kvass – a fermented ryebread drink – the result is a textured, vinous, and creamy sparkler with fresh acidity and notes of bread, flowers, and stone-fruits. A great wine substitute that really should be viewed as a crafted beverage in its own category.
Newest addition is a collaboration with Michelin-starred Restaurant Kadeau on Bornholm – a blend of gooseberry wine, pickled pinecones, and smoked blackberry leaf kefir. Sounds fun, right?
Copenhagen Sparkling Tea
"Everyone deserves a good glass of bubbles,” says Copenhagen Sparkling Tea, the brainchild of former top sommelier Jacob Kocemba. Working in one of the best restaurants in Copenhagen, he was struggling to find the right wine pairing for a dessert. But when he discovered the taste spectrum of tea, he found the solution for the pairing – not to mention the inspiration to found the pioneering brand offering sparkling non-alcoholic and low-alcoholic drinks based on tea extracts.
The sparkling teas are made from a blend of many different exclusive and organic teas, which are then added a dash of grape must for sweetness and perhaps a squeeze of lemon juice for balance. Bubbles are added, and the result is an aromatic, vinous drink with a body from the tea tannins that resemble those in wine. Five years since the first release, Copenhagen Sparkling Tea is now sold in more than 20 countries and many Michelin-starred restaurants.
Kunstbryggeriet Far & Søn
As the name implies, Kunstbryggeriet Far & Søn started out as a brewery. With Borino Fizz, they have branched out into a new, non-alcoholic venture which came about because they sought alcohol-free options for the guests in their brewery restaurant. Lots of experiments ensued, finally fermenting into their ’Borino Fizz’ line of non-alcoholic sparklers. Borino Fizz is made using a fermentation of water, sugar, yeast, and fragrant botanicals like lemongrass and lime. Usually, non-alcoholic sparklers have bubbles added, but with Borino Fizz, the fermentation takes place in the bottle over three weeks, during which complexity and taste develops.
”It’s not a soda, not wine, and not a beer. It’s a category of its own,” says founder and brewer Bo Rino Christiansen, who is reluctant to divulge further information about the specifics of the fermentation process. It’s a trade secret, he says.
Borino Fizz is not, though, and so far, it's popping up on the menu at many German and Danish Michelin-starred restaurants, including world-famous Alchemist in Copenhagen.
ISH Spirits
Morten Sørensen, founder of ISH Spirits, got the inspiration for ISH during his '100 days sober' experiment. Going out for drinks, he quickly got disappointed by the options offered. This, in turn, motivated him to create his own line of alcohol-free spirits. He wanted to be able to enjoy a Dark 'n’ Stormy without feeling seasick the next day.
At the end of 2018, ISH Spirits launched alcohol-free versions of gin and rum – GinISH and RumISH. GinISH is based on natural extracts of botanicals, and RumISH gets its flavour and colour from extracts, baked apples, vanilla, and nutmeg.
But what about the heat from the alcohol? Sørensen cleverly obtains that using extracted capsaicin from chili seeds provides an aftertaste that warms the palate – and works surprisingly well when used in cocktails.
Gnista Spirits
"Party like there’s a tomorrow," says Gnista Spirits. Gnista is Swedish for 'spark' and Gnista founder and chef Erika Ollén wanted to do just that when she set out to create the world’s first non-alcoholic spirit that resembles a fine spirit.
Her so-called 'impossible journey’ started with alcohol-free spirits made primarily with organic and local ingredients. Gnista’s line of alcohol-free spirits are made using rhubarb for acidity, oak infusion for tannins and body, raisins for sweetness, and ginger, black pepper, and habanero chili for that finishing bite. The spirits are made using spirit-making techniques like distillation and barrel-aging, along with lots of botanicals.
Gnista Floral Wormwood became the debut. A spirit resembling a bitter, with a taste of orange peel, white flowers, and wormwood, which is the botanical used to flavour absinthe. It is best drunk over ice or blended with tonic. Since then, the line has been expanded with other alcohol-free products, e.g., 'Red Not Wine’ – a grape juice flavoured with oak, raisins, pepper, and various floral extracts.