Square Root Non-Alcoholic Gin and Tonic

If you’re embarking on dry January you may wonder how you’re going to do without your G & T without buying an expensive alt-gin, as they’re often referred to these days.

The answer could well be Square Root London’s Non-alcoholic Gin & Tonic which is made by a Hackney-based company which beer writer Pete Brown and I selected as our drinks producer of the year when we judged the BBC Food & Farming awards back in 2015.

You’ll see instantly from the light, lemony colour it’s not a classic G & T although it contains many of the gin botanicals juniper, cubeb pepper, cardamom, liquorice, angelica, coriander together with Persian dried limes which you can definitely pick up in the finished drink. This base is blended with their own tonic water and fresh Sicilian lemon peel. It’s a bit like a drier, fresher, more natural tasting bitter lemon but has definitely nailed that crisp G & T character. You can buy it for £1.80 from their online shop.

They also sent over a bottle of their Sbagliato, a pale pink 0.5% cocktail-like shandy as they describe it (also £1.80) which they’ve made in collaboration with Partizan Brewing. Although it contains a tiny amount of beer it also includes grape must, aronia (chokeberries) wormwood and quinine so has the bittersweet taste of a Italian aperitvo,

What I like about Square Root is that they use entirely natural ingredients and make everything themselves from scratch. Given that, their prices are really reasonable plus delivery for 15 bottles is a modest £5.

I was sent the Square Root Non-Alcoholic Gin and Tonic and Sbagliato as free samples

CEDER’S alcohol-free ‘gin’

I’ve been a bit sceptical about the alcohol-free gin category - or alt-gin, as I gather we must now call it - but this couple of products from a South African and Swedish husband and wife team trading as CEDER’S (which apparently has to be written in capital letters) are really quite impressive

There are two versions: Ceder’s Classic (sorry, Ceder's I really can't do all these caps) which is similar in style to a London dry gin and Ceder’s Crisp - juniper combined with citrus, cucumber and camomile - which has a dominant cucumber note.

The botanicals for the drinks, which include Buchu and Rooibos, are sourced from the Cederberg mountains of South Africa, blended with Swedish water and bottled in Sweden. They’re a bit cheaper to try than market leader Seedlip though still comparatively expensive at £20 a 50cl bottle - in Sainsbury's only at the moment. (Seedlip charges around £25-28 for 70cl though you can find it for less.) Interestingly the product has been taken on and distributed by Pernod Ricard, a sign of how seriously the drinks multi-nationals are taking the alcohol-free category.

The only downside is that if you dilute them as recommended (which I did with Fevertree naturally light tonic water) you don’t get much flavour of the base ‘spirit’. I would personally go for 1:2 Ceder's to tonic rather than 1:3 which again bumps up the cost. They recommend serving the classic with lemon and rosemary and the Crisp with cucumber and mint.

Incidentally Sainsbury’s is reporting a significant increase in sales of alcohol-free drinks over the past year, with no-alcohol wine in particular seeing a +42% increase. From a pretty low base, I suspect but there's no doubt demand is growing.

Drink of the week: Crodino

More and more people I talk to seem to be cutting down on booze - or cutting it out entirely. That may be for obvious reasons like becoming pregnant or being on medication with which alcohol is incompatible but it’s definitely a trend - just as eating less meat is increasingly common.

The problem for most of us is what to drink when we're not drinking and the Italians as usual have it better nailed than most. Witness Crodino, a deliciously bitter alcohol-free drink that I discovered in Venice and which is an admirable substitute for an Aperol spritz. (Perhaps unsurprisingly as it’s owned by the same company)

It comes in dinky little 10cl bottles which you can simply serve on the rocks or, as I prefer, with a good splash of soda. Add a slice of orange and a large green olive and you’ve got yourself a sophisticated aperitivo. And it’s only 61 calories a bottle.

The only downside is the virulent orange colour* which of course applies to Aperol too and the fact that it’s at least twice as expensive here as in Italy. But at the moment I can't find anything comparable in the UK.

You can probably get it from your local Italian deli (I can from mine, Divino in Bristol who sell it for £15 a 10 bottle pack) or you can order it from Amazon (the original version is nicer than the blood orange one, IMHO)

* on the pack they warn that the colours they use may adversely affect children’s attention span and cause hyperactivity so I wouldn’t give it to your kids.

Big Drop Brewing 0.5% Pale Ale

I’ve been focussing quite a lot on alcohol-free drinks recently so I headed along to the Mindful Drinking festival in Spitalfields yesterday where I discovered this brilliant range of low alcohol (0.5%) beers.

They were all impressive - and beautifully packaged with colourful labels that depict rural Suffolk scenes - but I think the award winning pale ale is the most successful. It’s heavy on hops which makes up for the lack of alcohol and has an added dash of lime which makes it a good partner, they say, for a Thai chicken curry.

There’s also a convincing lager, a coffee-laden milk stout and - for Christmas - a spiced ale flavoured with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves that I think might benefit from being served warm or at least at centrally heated room temperature rather than chilled.

You can buy them from the low alcohol website drydrinker.com in cases of 6 to 24 bottles (6 bottles cost £16.99) or in a mixed case of 12 bottles for £30.99 if you want to try them all. They're also available at The Draft House pubs.