Free Spirits, Lyre's Spirit Co, Ritual Zero Proof, Seedlip Drinks Agave Set (1 × 750 mL + 3 × 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.

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.

Seedlip started in 2014 in Ben Branson’s cottage in the British countryside, with a small copper still, herbs from his own garden, and a book. The book was The Art of Distillation, published in 1651, which describes distilled remedies made without any alcohol in them at all — and that turned out to be the idea nobody had picked up in three and a half centuries.

What came of it takes six weeks a batch. Every ingredient is macerated and copper-pot distilled on its own before anything is blended, which is slower than making one distillate from a basket of botanicals and is the reason Garden 108 tastes of peas rather than of green. Then blending, filtration, and bottling in England.

There are four, and they go in different directions rather than being four shades of one idea. Garden 108 is peas and hay with rosemary, thyme and spearmint. Grove 42 is three kinds of orange over lemongrass and ginger, with a sansho peppercorn prickle. Spice 94 is Jamaican allspice and cardamom over oak and cascarilla, and finishes long and bitter. Notas de Agave is prickly pear, lime and agave with vanilla and damiana flower.

No sugar and no sweetener in any of them, which is the harder way to make something taste of anything.

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.