Sober Spritz

Rather than constructing alcohol-free spirits from botanical blends and flavourings, the Payan brothers asked a more radical question: why not start with real spirits and remove the alcohol? It sounds obvious in retrospect, but nobody had cracked it properly. The answer came through collaboration with perfumers in Grasse, the southern French town that sits at the heart of the global fragrance industry. The specialists there knew how to extract alcohol while preserving aromatic complexity, and Sober Spirits built their production process around exactly that expertise. The actual blending happens in a distillery near the Alps that has been running since 1875.

The process takes real distilled liquor, removes the ethanol in Grasse, and then blends the resulting extract with complementary botanicals. For the Spritz, that means blood orange, bitter orange, rhubarb, gentian and angelica working around a dealcoholised aperitivo base. It carries genuine bitterness and the kind of layered citrus character that makes a spritz worth drinking slowly, rather than something you tolerate as an alternative.

The wider Sober Spirits range extends beyond the aperitif style into rum, gin and amaretto expressions, each built on the same dealcoholisation method. The rum 0.0% won the IWSC award for best non-alcoholic spirit, and the gin has collected gold medals at major international competitions. The brand has operated in over thirty countries.

In the UK the spritz is the product most readily available, through Amazon and select specialist retailers. It sits at the premium end of the alcohol-free aperitivo category, priced to reflect the production method rather than competing on value.