Maker’s Alliance to champion new drink categories

Brands including Botivo and Lockdown Liquor have launched the Maker’s Alliance, a collective to spotlight emerging beverage categories.

The collective hopes to celebrate the craft behind beverage development, garnering respect usually reserved for distillers, winemakers and brewers, and champion innovative brands in newer drinks categories such as alcohol alternatives and ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails.

Botivo is a non-alcoholic aperitif brand with a mission to ‘create a remarkable drink that exists not in opposition to alcohol but in a category of its own’.

Lockdown Liquor creates premium RTDs, having launched a bottled range in 2020 during the pandemic and adding a canned line in 2022.

The collective has three pledges: to craft liquids in-house, guided by its maker-founders; to use only real ingredients, without flavourings of any kind; and to introduce new and ‘discerning’ taste profiles.

Imme Ermgassen, co-founder of Botivo, said: “If you look at all of the historically great drinks categories like wine, craft beer and whisky, they have a maker culture at their core. They were created by people who passionately and lovingly crafted the liquids themselves – they didn’t use flavour houses.

“This maker culture has been glaringly missing from new categories like the non-alcoholic one – until now. The Maker’s Alliance is all about shining a spotlight on makers in the category, their skills and how they are working with raw materials to craft new and discerning taste profiles. We want to lead our categories into the future.”

Other brands in the Maker’s Alliance include wine alternative brands Muri and Ama Brewery, and soft drink brand Rapscallion Soda.

Jack Durling, co-founder of Lockdown Liquor, added: “The Maker’s Alliance was formed to showcase the leading makers and producers of their drinks category, as well as championing the production methods and craft that goes in behind the scenes.

“The drinks category is growing at an incredibly rapid rate, which has seen an increase in new brands wanting to join the party. However, it is clear their focus has been on the speed of launching products to market, produced by third-party flavour houses in the most cost-effective fashion – resulting in a compromised liquid, rather than producing a unique and innovative liquid offering to consumers.

“Consumers are rightly requesting the provenance of ingredients and sustainability credentials when considering paying a premium for a cocktail. We are proud to be transparent about our processes and methods on what goes into creating our award-winning cocktails.”

The Maker’s Alliance aims to spotlight brands that own every step of the making process, from raw ingredients to the bottle. A new video series is in the works, which will showcase the behind-the-scenes processes of its members.

The alliance also hopes to host events and offer advice to new brands.