Sarah Kate enjoyed the wine. The avid runner, communications professional, and mother preferred cool-climate Chardonnays and Barolos from Italy. But in early 2020, he realized that his interest in wine had morphed into three or four glasses a night.
He didn’t feel healthy. She realized that her children understood what she was doing to herself. He tried to cut down and struggled to moderate his consumption. So, in the early days of the pandemic, she challenged herself to go dry for 30 days. She was amazed at how she felt: clearer, happier, and more present.
“Our society never really goes there,” she says. “You just know you should have a drink…because that’s what people do.”
That summer, a friend offered him non-alcoholic gin. It was called the Sobrii and was made in Stratford, Ontario. The non-alcoholic beers and wines he’d tried so far hadn’t been his thing. Other drinks felt youthful, like juice and soda. A spirit substitution tasted like “awful water”. But this liquid in his glass smelled of juniper and ginseng. The first sip was a revelation: it tasted like an elevated adult experience.
“Somebody out there cares about what people who don’t want to drink are drinking,” he remembers thinking. “I realized that we can be included.”
Dry January is a popular time for Canadians to cut back on alcohol, but more people are rethinking their year-round drinking. Canada Statistics poll in early 2021 noted that while 24 percent of respondents were drinking more in the pandemic, 22 percent were slowing down. (There has been a notable increase in hospitalizations for chronic alcohol-related conditions in Canada during the pandemic, according to data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information.)
British journalist Ruby Warrington popularized the term “soberly curious” when she explored her “awkward” relationship with alcohol in the 2010s. Talking to friends and family, she realized she wasn’t alone. People didn’t necessarily see themselves as addicted to alcohol, but felt that drinking was problematic, he writes. And it was hard to talk about it in an alcohol-soaked culture.
Warrington, who has lived in the US for the past decade, published “Sober Curious: The Blissful Sleep, Greater Focus, Limitless Presence, and Deep Connection Awaiting Us All on the Other Side of Alcohol” in 2018.
Sober curiosity does not necessarily mean abstinence. The idea is to be honest about how alcohol affects your life, she says.
When he started exploring his habits, there wasn’t much to fill the void: mostly non-alcoholic beer and “expensive sugary mocktails,” he writes in an email. Seedlip, a soft drink from the UK, was heralded as a pioneer in the field when it launched in 2015. The industry has exploded since then, “removing another barrier…for people who want to quit smoking or reduce their consumption,” he writes. .
Canadians spent $9.4 million on non-alcoholic spirits in 2019, and by 2020, that figure had risen to $22.9 million, according to market research from Euromonitor. It’s a tiny fraction of the $6 billion worth of spirits Canadians drank in the fiscal year ending March 2020, but it’s growing fast. This February, the LCBO will offer non-alcoholic spirits for the first time: Seedlip Grove and Tanqueray 0.
Sarah Kate created the website Some clean fun in 2021, a year after she embarked on a “non-alcoholic lifestyle”, posting news, recipes, reviews and links to online marketplaces. Page views went from hundreds to thousands. He began appearing on television as a soft drink sommelier. She and a friend ran a pop-up store for a few days in December on the beaches, having to reorder almost everything after their first weekend.
At Toronto’s Cocktail Emporium, they only had Seedlip in the non-alcoholic spirits category five years ago. Now there are so many options that they can’t store them all.
“We had to bring in more racks,” says general manager Lauren McNicol.
Bob Huitema, the founder of DistillX Beverages, the maker of sober, grew up on a farm outside of Stratford. Renovating her Toronto home in 2017, she enjoyed a cocktail after a long day, but she didn’t like the hangover. He tried non-alcoholic spirits and thought he could do better.
Huitema is a do-it-yourselfer with experience in the marketing and sales side of the beverage industry, and a love of chemistry. He says the growth in the non-alcoholic spirits market is not driven by technical advances, but by a general push toward wellness: a growing acceptance of veggie burgers and non-alcoholic beer by people who ate steak. and drank beer, apart from those who abstained. The quality and variety of the product help to “ignite the growth”.
Huitema partnered with Niagara College’s research and innovation division in 2018 to experiment with an alternative to gin, focusing on mouthfeel and flavor intensity. (Huitema paid for his services and retains 100 percent of the intellectual property.)
He started with the gin for a reason. Spirits like whiskey, tequila, and vodka are heavily dominated by an ethanol flavor. “We can burn a little, but the taste of ethanol is unique and hard to replicate,” he says. The gin is botanical so there is more flavor to work with.
At a distillery in Stratford, the DistillX team steeps botanicals in alcohol to maximize flavor extraction. They distill that mixture to remove almost all of the alcohol. (Below 0.5 percent is considered “non-alcoholic” in Canada and the US, Huitema says.)
Flavor molecules prefer alcohol to water, so Huitema had to figure out how to make the flavor stay in the water.
It launched Sobrii’s non-alcoholic gin in the fall of 2019 and recently added a non-alcoholic tequila, hoping to capitalize on the thirst for margaritas in the United States. While there is no drinking age requirement, Sobrii is only marketed to people over the legal drinking age. “The logic is that we’re targeting people who already drink and may be ‘seriously curious,'” he says. The Ontario Alcoholic Beverage Licensing and Control Act does not apply to beverages with less than 0.5 percent alcohol by volume or less.
Non-alcoholic spirits are not usually intended to be drunk neat. They rely on mixers like tonic or ginger ale to replace the alcohol burn, explains Nick Meyer, marketing manager for Aburi Restaurants Canada.
As the beverage manager at King West’s Minami in the fall of 2020, he mixed Sobrii with blackberry syrup, crushed sage and strawberry and topped it off with tonic water. It was a rei and a tonic, rei being the Japanese word for zero.
He was surprised at how well it did, especially at $12. (A 750ml bottle of Sobrii costs $35, which is similar to the cost of alcoholic gin.)
Huitema was in the dragon’s lair in the fall of 2021, offering dragons a non-alcoholic gin and tonic. They each wanted a deal. In its last fiscal year, it had $300,000 in sales, mostly online, supported by retailers like Well.ca., Pusateri’s and Cocktail Emporium.
The next frontier is the supermarket chains, which have been reluctant. They want more data.
“I keep kicking the can,” he says.
Not all offerings try to replicate a spirit, says Sarah Kate of Some Good Clean Fun. Some companies are trying to create their own “elevated” cocktail mixes.
“What can you put in a drink that will help you feel good, relax and, you know, have a little experience without the hangover?” she asks.
Leanne Kisil, a former professional hockey player and business graduate, created a line of elixirs called Solbru in 2020. Kisil stopped drinking when he studied holistic nutrition a few years ago.
To make his alcohol-free elixirs, he blends herbs, apple cider vinegar, spices, and other natural ingredients, including mushroom extracts used in herbal medicine to boost energy and brain function. (The drinks don’t taste like mushrooms; the other ingredients balance out the earthy flavor, he says.) So far, the response has been excellent. Made in Winnipeg, its four elixirs are available in the US and Canada.
Toronto sobriety coach Amy C. Willis never liked the taste of alcohol, which is why elixirs are her favorite adult beverages.
“She’s very intentional,” he says of Kisil. “It’s like a category of its own.”
Having plenty of options is important in a society where drinking is so ingrained.
“Alcohol has become that drug that requires an explanation when we no longer use it,” says Willis, who quit drinking five years ago. She became a certified sobriety and mindset coach after she began speaking out about her drinking problems. Many women came because they felt the same way: the alcohol was not helping them, but they didn’t know how to stop.
“We drink when we’re sad and we drink when we’re happy and we drink because it’s Tuesday,” she says. “So having a more normalized experience when socializing and not drinking is one of the strongest points of soft drinks.”
Reference-www.thestar.com