There are no fewer than eleven new additions to Alcohol Companion‘s Top of the Pops, a light-hearted shortlist of enjoyable alcohol-free drinks.
These come thanks to the enormous range of samples available at London’s first Mindful Drinking Festival on August 13th, the work of the Club Soda movement for mindful drinkers.
The motherlode of new chart entries includes two wines: Bees Knees white and rose, brewed using bacterial rather than yeast fermentation; and Woodstar made from acia palm berries, botanicals and cocoa.
Beers make a strong showing too, with eight entries: Big Drop’s lactose-enhanced stout, pale ale, lager and spiced ale; Nirvana’s Karma pale ale, Kosmic stout and Tantra pale ale; and FitBeer, a low-calorie Bavarian-style lager.
And there is one hard-to-categorise-drink: Botonique, a botanically-based soft drink for wine lovers. There were also many superior soft drinks and teas happy to be a drinking experiences all of their own.
Existing chart entries present included Eisberg’s wine, Heineken’s 0.0 lager; Seedlip alcohol-free spirit and St Peter’s craft ale. Doubtless there were other extraordinary liquid taste experiments unwittingly missed. ■