Flavours and fragrances 55%
The proportion of UK adults who planned to moderate their alcohol intake in 2023. Tesco
trend toward sobriety can partly be explained financially. That’s especially so when individuals grapple with high inflation and real-terms wage cuts. This is echoed by worries among young people about the physical and mental impact of boozing. It’s such concerns, in fact, that led Rohan Radhakrishnan, co-founder at Quarter, along with business partner Fabian Clark, to create a drinks business solely focused on providing lower-proof alternatives to high ABV spirits.
Fabian is an amateur athlete concerned with keeping fit, while Rohan worries about the overall impact of drinking. As such, their startup was born, in part, from personal experience. “We saw that people still want a few mid-week drinks with friends and, like myself, might have been conscious of wanting to avoid overconsumption and the follow-on anxiety and physical impact,” Radhakrishnan explains. Many punters seem to agree – and such reasoning is trackable in consumer choices. In the ‘no and low’ alcohol market, IWSR tracked almost double-figure sales growth in 2022. By 2023, Tesco had found that demand for alternative drinks had rocketed by 40% over two years. As a senior beverages buyer wrote on the retailer’s website, drinkers are increasingly “prepared to buy no and low alcohol beers as long as the quality is good.”
But herein lies the problem. Analysis by The
Grocer found low or no-alcohol drinks can often be ignored – mostly due to perceptions of bad taste. In 2019, for instance, a Statista survey of South Korean beer drinkers concluded that a belief that
“In principle, this technology can do all the flavours and fragrances of beer that currently use chemicals, but we can replace them with natural aromas to make them more sustainable.”
Professor Sotirios Kampranis
alcohol-free alternatives wouldn’t have the right flavour profile was found to be the biggest prohibitive factor in turning them away from real beer. Research in Italy found something similar. As Radhakrishnan explains, attempts to either subtract alcohol – or add flavour – to booze-free drinks can also create unhealthy and less visually appealing products. “Some non-alcoholic products can be underwhelming,” he says, while “others try to replicate the mouthfeel, experience and flavours through the integration of sugar. Oils in the [alcohol-free] distilling process can come off so the booze can be cloudier too.”
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Innovation not inebriation With consumers still unsure if alternatives to alcohol will please their palates, brewers and distillers are innovating in attempts to woo sober (or mostly sober) drinkers. Some techniques here are remarkably secretive. AF Drinks, which sits within Pernod Ricard’s innovation portfolio, sells alcohol- free versions of recognisable tipples: cans of G&T, Rosé, Cuba Libre and the like. They don’t explain what their trademarked botanical is – it’s simply advertised as being able to replicate the warmth alcohol provides – but is nonetheless in all of their products. Other companies are more up-front. Japanese brewing giant Asahi promise their alcohol- free alternative to best-selling beer Asahi Super Dry retains the ‘super-premium’ taste of its boozy forebear. It was made using de-alcoholisation: a process of brewing beer via the usual method – using water, yeast, malt and hops – but then getting rid of the ethanol via boiling or vacuum distillation. Yet as Professor Sotirios Kampranis explains, this popular method of booze-free brewing isn’t perfect. Among other things, notes the University of Copenhagen researcher and founder of bio- technology firm EvodiaBio, it’s expensive for brewers, struggles to hit the right flavour profiles, and has a huge environmental impact. Flavour in full, low or non-alcoholic beer largely derives from aroma hops. But in booze-free brewing, these are either thrown out or re-inserted back at the end – after the alcohol has been burnt off in an attempt to return flavour to the now alcohol-free drink. This can be costly from a brewing and taste perspective, while Kamparis argues it is unsustainable, which is of growing concern to consumers. “This process is a tremendous problem for the brewers,” he summarises. “Even when you attempt to put the aromas from hops back in because there is no ethanol the aroma struggles to come out so brewers put more and more in which becomes extremely costly.”
This all explains why Kampranis believes yeast is the answer to flavour, cost and sustainability problems. EvodiaBio’s signature product is Yops: an augmented baker’s yeast which, via a fermentation process, secretes aromas which can be captured – and then inserted into the brewing process at different stages, accentuating the brewer’s desired tasting notes. The added benefit, Kampranis argues, is that this method can be tailored to match the exact taste a brewer wants to deliver. Taking over a decade to develop, Yops has outperformed non- alcoholic beers brewed via traditional methods in official taste-testing, while also providing environmental benefits. “With such flavouring technologies,” Kampranis stresses, “you decrease
Ingredients Insight /
www.ingredients-insight.com
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