CleanCo, Optimist Botanicals, USKO Vodka Set (2 × 700 mL + 1 × 500 mL)

USKO is made by Spirits of Virtue, the company Roddy and Kerr Nicoll built in Scotland. The brothers set out to make alcohol-free spirits that could sit at the premium end rather than the novelty end, and started where it is hardest — vodka, which has nowhere to hide.

Everything begins with Deeside spring water, which is the one thing a Scottish drinks company can take for granted and the one thing a vodka cannot do without.

The range has since widened past vodka, and the brothers have taken the same approach to whisky. What has not changed is the target: not a soft drink that gestures at a spirit, but something that behaves like one in a glass.

Spencer Matthews started CleanCo in November 2019, after deciding his own drinking was not doing him any favors and finding that the alternatives on offer were either sweet or sanctimonious. The brief was neither: something you could pour into the same glass, in front of the same people, without explaining yourself.

Where most of the category picks one spirit and does it well, CleanCo went wide early — gin, rhubarb gin, vodka, tequila, rum and whiskey — and became the first to cover the full back bar rather than a corner of it.

The work has gone into texture as much as taste. The usual complaint about a spirit with nothing in it is that it feels thin, and most of what CleanCo has been doing since is closing that gap.

Tommy and Lisa Farr Johnstone moved to Los Angeles and found their habits changing — farmers markets and hiking where bars used to be. What they could not find was anything worth ordering when they went out, so in January 2020 they started making it.

They spent eighteen months with a master distiller in downtown LA developing three blends, each drawn from a different part of the city and its edges: the coastline, the canyons, the desert. Ten to fifteen botanicals go into each, pulled apart by steam, vacuum and CO2 extraction rather than by soaking in spirit.

Optimist is a certified B Corp, and the founders put their weight behind a Venice non-profit working with young people experiencing homelessness.