14 Oct 2024 Seedlip founder has something new abrewing

Seedlip revolutionised alcohol-free drinking. Ben Branson launched Seedlip in 2014 and sold his majority share for an undisclosed sum in 2019. Five years on, he’s having a second crack at reinventing the low-and-no alcohol scene.….

Ben Branson birthed the alcohol free spirits scene when he launched Seedlip nearly ten years ago. Five years after selling his majority share, he’s ready to change the face of drinking. Again.

Through the launch of Seedlip, Ben Branson established a reputation as the founding father of the alcohol-free scene. With the range of botanical spirits, he showed how grown-up drinks needn’t be inextricably linked to poison.

But in 2019, the farming boy from North Lincolnshire sold his majority stake to Diageo for an undisclosed, but certainly huge, amount. It bought Branson time to dream up Pollen Projects, the company he believes can reimagine the alcohol-free scene afresh. Again.

Branson’s second go at scene-leading innovation involves extracting flavour from thousands of types of wood to create a new range of dark spirits.

“We’ve explored them medicinally, but we’ve not explored trees for taste and flavour, and that becomes incredibly exciting,” says the 41-year-old.

He passes me a dram of the liquid he calls Sylva. I’m the first journalist to try the product, and that feels like a privilege, but also a bit like Christmas morning when you unwrap presents and say they’re great whether you like them or not.

My first thought was that Sylva has brilliant strength, the North African padauk tree wood offering a fresh flavour profile I haven’t tasted before. It’s light, bright and sweet, though the mouthfeel needed some work (I hadn’t tried the final retail version which was still being worked on weeks before launch).

Is this the next frontier in alcohol-free drinking?

There are over 73,000 types of trees Branson could test for flavour, but the focus will be on British varieties. “Knowing that 9,000 trees aren’t discovered yet, and celebrating the magic of that kind of brilliant diversity of provenance and flavour is fascinating to me,” he says. “We’re trying to find the most efficient and effective way to make the best dark non-alcoholic experience possible.”

Seedlip launched in 2015 as the world’s first distilled non-alcoholic spirit, and there are now hundreds of competitors, particularly in white spirits. The rise of brands has led to an inevitable quality issue, believes Branson, given the industry is unregulated.

It is a poisoned chalice: experimentation is rife because of the lack of rules, so we’re living through non-alc’s Prohibition, but then again, cowboys are trying to make a quick buck with bad products.

“I’m not seeing in dark, non-alcoholic liquids the same level of craft, attention, provenance, process as we see in fantastic dark alcohol,” he sums up.

How on earth do they choose which to test from 73,000 trees? “That’s a really good question,” admits Branson. Local trees, exotic wood suppliers to the musical instrument world, and samples sent by industry colleagues are in the queue, including a recent piece of thermo-treated, toasted Ash that smells like coffee and Christmas pudding. “That’s something we want to explore.”

Next year Pollen Projects hopes to launch laboratories in New York and Kyoto, focusing on local wood. The timber isn’t always terribly interesting. Describing a recent trail with Mulberry, Branson slows his speech and, for the first time, his enthusiasm tapers off. “It was amazing from a flavour perspective, but it didn’t work. The liquid became really cloudy and wouldn’t clarify so we had to park that.” 

Bottles of booze are lined up on shelves around the laboratory like trophies, but Branson hasn’t touched a drop in over ten years (he works with one full-time colleague, researcher Jack Wareing, who isn’t sober.)

“What we are trying to achieve is a liquid you can sip that’s grown up, a liquid that has complexity and character and body and depth and a really amazing finish.” The industry talks about a ‘burn’. “I don’t think anybody loves the burn of alcohol, but if it’s not there, you miss it.”

How does the actual science work?

It’s complicated, but, essentially, wood is cut into chips, then baked in an oven. It then goes through a process called sonic maturation, which uses oxygen, pressure, heat and ultrasound to extract flavour and colour.

Oxygenated, pressured stainless steel kegs are filled with grain distillate and wood and aged in an ultrasonic maturation chamber. Ultrasound waves crash into each other to produce high energy and small bursts of force, happening in liquid tens of thousands of times per second, and these waves extract the flavour and colour.

“This effectively means that we can do what a traditional barrel does, but rather than waiting for years to achieve the required flavour we can get there in a matter of days.” ….

Read the full article here: City AM