Espadafor, Lyre's Spirit Co, Ritual Zero Proof Rum Tasting Set (1 × 1000 mL + 1 × 750 mL + 2 × 700 mL)

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.

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.

Ritual Zero Proof starts from the opposite end to most of the shelf. Rather than making a spirit and stripping the alcohol out, the bottles are built from botanical flavors upward, so nothing is removed at the end. That is why the range is described as alternatives rather than as gin, whiskey or rum: each is designed to stand in for its counterpart pour for pour in a cocktail.

The hard part, by their own account, is the burn — the heat that alcohol gives a drink and that a botanical blend has no obvious way to imitate. Ritual say recreating it is the difficult trick at the center of what they make, and it is the one thing about their process they decline to explain.

The brand is owned by Diageo North America. The range runs to five bottles: a gin, a whiskey, an agave spirit, a rum and an aperitif, each made for mixing rather than for drinking neat.