Espadafor, Free Spirits, Lyre's Spirit Co, Monday Gin Set (1 × 750 mL + 3 × 700 mL)

Espadafor began in the centre of Granada on 11 October 1939, when Francisco Espadafor Ramírez turned his business toward wine and non-alcoholic drinks. It has stayed in the family ever since. His son Juan Espadafor Caba took it on in 1952 and built the first proper factory in 1967.

The turn that matters here came in 1985, when Eulogio and José Espadafor Llobera took over and pointed the whole company at drinks without alcohol in them. WHISSIN, the whisky alternative, arrived in 1998 and is still in the range.

The next generation came in from 2011 and took the drinks past sixty countries. The factory moved out to Escúzar, south of Granada, onto an avenue that carries the family name.

Mark Livings and Carl Hartmann founded Lyre's in Australia in 2019, setting out to build a range that echoed the classic spirits rather than inventing new flavors.

The name is the method. The lyrebird imitates whatever it hears — other birds, a camera shutter, a chainsaw — and the range is built the same way, each bottle answering a spirit a bartender already knows how to use. That is why the labels say Gin Alternative and Dark Rum Alternative rather than inventing a word for what is in them.

The bottles carry the Social Animals, a cast of characters drawn one to a liquid. The range now runs from the spirits through a sparkling Classico to canned cocktails, and the company sells in more than sixty countries.

Milan Martin spent over a decade at Ogilvy & Mather in London and New York, then ran Grey's San Francisco office, before starting The Free Spirits Company in Marin County. The question he says he started from was whether alcohol needed to be the star of a cocktail at all.

The method has a name — distillate reconstruction. Real materials go in first: American white oak, European juniper, Mexican blue agave. Their essence is distilled off and then the nose, the flavor and the mouthfeel are rebuilt around it, which is why the bottles carry weight in a stirred drink rather than thinning out.

The company is small and still run from Mill Valley.