NON-ALCOHOLIC SPIRITS
LYRE’S LAUNCHES
NON-ALCOHOLIC SPIRITS RANGE MARK LIVINGS, CEO AND FOUNDER OF NEW NON-ALCOHOLIC SPIRITS RANGE, LYRE’S, REVEALS TO CRAIG HAWTIN-BUTCHER THE BRAND’S HUGE PLANS TO REVOLUTIONISE DRINKING OPTIONS IN PUBS.
WHAT IS LYRE’S? What we wanted to bring to market – and have been working on for over two years – is a system that is friendly to bartenders. So our guiding principles were: can we help bartenders make classics, and their own favourite cocktails, and to make a non-alcoholic version, all they’d need to do is reach for a single bottle?
WHAT ARE YOUR PRODUCTS? We have 13 SKUs. It spans the gamut of arguably the world’s most loved spirits. We have a gin. Our other two big movers are bourbon and whisky. Then we’ve got our rums – a white rum, a spiced rum and a dark rum. We have two vermouths – a dry vermouth and a sweet rosso vermouth. In the liqueurs, we have absinth, triple-sec, amaretto and a coffee liqueur. We can cover pretty much the entirety of the top 10 cocktails by demand.
SO WHAT’S THE NAME?
single-purchase occasion into something that’s far more profitable for the venue.
We see our products as mixers and very important to the pub and hotel channel. We expect to see [different takes on] rum and coke, bourbon and coke, gin and tonic, etc.
It’s a derivative of lyre bird. The Australian lyre bird, really interestingly, is nature’s greatest mimic. It can mimic the birdsong of anything it can hear. So we thought that as a brand set up around mimicry and creating homage, it would be an extraordinary icon.
HOW BIG IS THE MARKET?
HOW ARE THEY MADE?
They’re in exceptionally high growth and there’s more market demand than there is products to satisfy demand. Seedlip [are saying they're] on track for 3m bottles this year, that’s a half-million unit case. To put that in context, that’s a US$50m business. But given that gin is 5% of the total spirit category, what does that look like if you kick the door off and say, ‘actually we’ve got these alternatives that go across the broad range of spirits’?
We don’t use a distillation process. We do pull in ingredients though. For example, this rosso vermouth – this has over 31 different, naturally-derived essences, extracts and distillates. So what we’re doing is taking the same compounds, the same molecules, that distillation will throw into an ethanol base, we’re just getting to those particular compounds in a different method. We’re combining them post into an aqueous base.
We’ve crafted these beverages to get as close as possible to that using some really, really cool stuff in food science from natural ingredients. But there’s still a gap. First of all we don’t recommend that people use these as sipping, don’t sip it like a whisky and so on. The second thing, they absolutely shine when they’re used in cocktails and mixers. Thirdly, they need to be handled slightly differently to their alcohol brothers and sisters. Because they have a water base, water is the enemy of these. So only shake to instill a drop in temperature, not to produce further ice melt in the beverage because you do reduce that flavour intensity.
WHO ARE YOU TARGETING?
HOW ARE YOU EDUCATING PUBLICANS?
HOW SHOULD LYRE’S BE SERVED?
The first thing that we’d tell someone with a pub is: alcohol consumption by volume in markets like the US are down 5% year on year. That’s an enormous number and that’s resulting in less foot traffic to venues. So having a robust, interesting range of non-alcoholic options to keep these places relevant to the consumer is a really important thing to do. There’s a really interesting story here for venue profitability. So a hotel selling a non-alcoholic beverage there’s people getting free waters or buying a very low-priced standard soft drink or lemon, lime and bitters. So we can transform that
These are as close as we can get to the original thing, so use them like you would use the original. So for the bourbon, make an old fashioned or a manhattan. For the gin and the rosso [vermouth], go and make a negroni. No need to trade out of those beautiful classics that we all love, just switch the bottle.
WHAT IS YOUR POSITIONING
It’s very, very clear that consumers are demanding this. The first one is millennials – they’re more mindful with their consumption, around food and beverage. Then we’ve got women who are pregnant. A lot of people are now saying ‘I don’t actually want to drink during the week’ or ‘I want those alcohol-free days’, and this is giving them a real alternative. Then we have the boomer population. We have an ageing population and they’re a significant population. It’s really important that we can continue to offer them [alternatives to] the beverages that they’ve grown to love over the course of a lifetime.
16 | APRIL 2019 AUSTRALIAN HOTELIER
ARE THESE EXACTLY LIKE THEIR ALCOHOL BROTHER?
WHAT’S THE ROLLOUT? We’re doing probably the slightly absurd and quite ambitious thing of doing a multicontinental launch. In Australia, Swift and Moore will be our distributors.
