The Future Of Alcohol Might Be No Alcohol | Claire Warner

0:00Alex Chisnall:What stops founders from building something meaningful isn't the lack of ideas, it's the fear of getting started. I'm Alex Chisnall and this is Screw It Just Do It, the podcast for people who are ready to stop waiting, take action and make things happen.

0:14Claire Warner:I'm not by any stretch anti-alcohol. I think that there is. I decided to stop making vodka. The world doesn't need any more vodka. There's like 600 brands of vodka in the US alone. And I'm like, you know, we don't need any more. So we stumbled across this recipe for acorn wine that was hidden in the back of a 16th century manuscript. We recreated it and, you know, it wasn't delicious, but it was very bitter. And we thought, actually, here is something that we could repurpose for modern 21st century drinking that was not about how little alcohol or no alcohol it had. It instead was just a celebration of all these great ingredients

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1:36Alex Chisnall:Now let's jump into the main conversation. For those who don't know who you are, what you do business wise, could you give us a little bit of context for business you are in now as co-founder of Acorn, which is you know non-alcoholic aperitifs it's just a brand of seedlet but um yeah um tell us a

1:56Claire Warner:little bit about your backstory would be would be great uh yeah thanks so i have been in the drinks industry for um about 20 20 years now so i um wanted to be a barrister uh studied law uh went to university to obviously study law and decided quite quickly that i probably wasn't cut out for that career and um while I was studying I was in hospitality this is a story uh that many many people in hospitality share actually you know they just fall into this wonderful industry and I um fell into the hospitality industry um started working for brands um eventually started working for LVMH uh which is Louis Vuitton Mert Hennessy um the largest luxury goods company in the world and one of their brands was introduced into the UK in 2002 I started working for that brand in 2003 that was Belvedere vodka and I spent 15 years working with Belvedere I gradually worked my way up to eventually being in charge of all of the spirit creation and education for for Belvedere vodka and during that time I made 13 Belvederes with the brilliant brilliant creative distilling team in Poland and and then three years ago I decided to stop making vodka the world doesn't need any more vodkas Alex that was the kind of like one of the real I just like as yeah it was like 600 brands of vodka in the US alone and I'm like you know we don't need anymore yeah and just thinking like one brand could have various numbers the extensions um and so i um you know ben branson who is the founder of seed lip and really uh you're seen as the pioneer of this great non-alcoholic movement um he he asked me to to join him to create another brand a sister brand to seed lip and to you know take non-alc in a in a different direction um I was very interested in what we drink with food and friends when we're not drinking alcohol and so I uh yeah left the beverage alcohol uh industry behind and then set up acorn and we launched uh acorn will be two in May so um from yeah so it's been 20 years of drinking all different

4:33Alex Chisnall:guys is essentially what's your favorite drink by the way oh god um well acorn obviously match

4:41Claire Warner:um you know i'm very i'm a very sort of uh curious drinker i like lots of different things depending on where i am i think uh drink have drinks have an amazing transportative nature so So you can really enjoy, you know, a spritz at home and it might take you back to, you know, sitting on a beach somewhere, somewhere warm or a cafe in Rome or whatever. So I drink expansively. But over the last few years, I've really noticed that I wanted to drink less, drink alcohol less, but not necessarily wanted to sort of like socialize any less or, you know, be out with friends, eating and drinking any less.

5:25Claire Warner:and so that for me is where I kind of saw a gap for for acorn yeah I was gonna say like um

5:33Alex Chisnall:it's interesting like say the last four five six years I was working with um virgin startup Richard Branson's not-for-profit and there probably wasn't a week that didn't go by that somebody wasn't trying to uh sell me on that sell me on the idea that the industry needed another gin or that we needed another pale ale you know those are like the two most common drinks and you just be looking at the numbers and you're going you're literally just licking your finger and sticking your finger in the air if you think you can get the same numbers as a you know x y and z etc and you you must see those trends come and i don't know if they've gone but what's

6:11Claire Warner:happened during the last 12 months for example but no i mean gin everybody everybody wants a gin i I think gin is still, gin's a unique, you know, it's a unique spirit in that it is very much about the botanical mix. And we are getting quite curious and quite confident when it comes to what we eat and drink today. And I think there's gins for everybody. And that's probably one of the reasons why that category has exploded. Because if you like rose petals, then there's a gin for you. if you like cucumber if you like you know any number of botanicals there's something for you in the gin world now um and that's exciting because I think that's probably done more for us in terms of opening up opening us up to flavor and being curious and exploring what flavor is and you know a few years ago it was really about vodka you know vodka was what we what we were drinking and I love vodka and I think it's got a beautiful history and there's lots of different styles but unless you're a true vodka aficionado and if you're mixing vodka they are very similar once mixed and um you know we were sort of a little bit more conservative about what we were eating drink or eating and drinking a few years ago whereas gin I think has helped us become um much more sort of like bold and brave with our flavor choices and as a consequence you now see lots of different types of ingredients uh in supermarkets and what we eat and drink at home and how we cook so i i think that yeah gin deserves its moment in the sun but it'll get over it'll be eclipsed by something else sooner or later not non-alcoholic non-alcoholic yeah i

7:59Alex Chisnall:went to it might have been two years ago now but to the bombay bombay sapphire um which is in hampshire and i found that again i'm a real history buff so i found that fascinating and that was literally like the botanicals and the history and the geography and it just made me you know curiouser and curiouser um and i love that yeah yeah and for you you know when you're targeted when you're looking at you know the lack of choice in like non-alcoholic drink sector and a niche within this that you spotted was specifically there was little to actually drink with food um how did you how did you set about one identifying this opportunity and and did you see it as an opportunity immediately or did that take you far longer than i'm kind of uh making an

8:49Claire Warner:assumption you know um acorn is not yet to so um half of that the life of acorn has been spent under the shadow of COVID right so we have had the last year to really be very I think much closer to what our consumer is looking for and that's taught us a lot about what you know our purpose as a brand and I think we've learned a lot about our brand over the last 12 months before that when we were starting out with you know what are we going to create how are we going to take non-alc into a different direction at the time there was a lot of um there was a lot of interest around vermouth and uh drinking sort of lower abv drinks like spritzes uh it's a good example um we were sort of perhaps looking into our crystal ball and thinking vermouth tonic you know those sites of drinks are up growing in popularity and there's you know, such a botanical richness to the world of aperitivo and aperitifs.

10:04Claire Warner:There's such breadth to that category. And aperitifs aren't defined by their alcohol content. They're really defined by where they come from, what they taste like, how you drink them. So for me, there was this lovely space that we could create something really complex, um multifaceted full of delicious botanicals uh take inspiration from the European aperitif tradition but make it very British obviously I'm British um no point pretending that I'm anything other than you know a girl from Crystal Palace um you know I don't have Italian roots my grandmother isn't French so this needed to be very you know authentically me um you know Ben And also long agricultural history of being in farming for a long time here.

10:58Claire Warner:So we really just were feeling that aperitif moment when I started. And there's something beautiful about aperitif that it always comes with food and it's very social. and those moments with food and being social are often the moments that when you're not drinking you do feel excluded and aperitif the aperitivo culture seemed to be something that we could we could create a range of aperitifs and really not have to compromise on flavor or complexity and not have to be like a less than version but instead you know take my experience of flavor and building you know great drinks um and apply it to this this this range of non-alcoholic properties and you know we took inspiration from vermouth and so we based the range um firstly on grapes so that was important that we had a really delicious base so we use um we we work with one um vineyard in sussex and they grow pinot noir murnier and chardonnay grapes and so for those people who love champagne will recognize that those grapes that that go into champagne and they are also the base for the delicious english sparkling wine that comes out of uh sussex um so we took that as our base we work with this brilliant grower he gives us a lot of control over where we harvest so we get a good balance of sweetness and acidity and then we then we add botanicals from all over the world and of course you know the eponymous acorn that we discovered was a very traditional bittering ingredient from this country and this country lacks really bold bitter complex bitter ingredients a lot of them come from europe or or further afield so we stumbled across this recipe for acorn wine that was hidden in the back of a 16th century manuscript we recreated it and you know it wasn't delicious but it was very bitter and we thought actually here is something that we could repurpose for um you know modern you know 21st century drinking that was not about how little alcohol or no alcohol it had but instead was just a celebration of all these great ingredients um and and as a consequence yes drink them with food drink them in spritzes and i personally think the least interesting thing about them is that they're non-alcoholic i think that they're so full of flavor um and so delicious that it doesn't

13:38Alex Chisnall:doesn't even come into it really so that's it for today's bite-sized episode of screw it just do it make sure you follow or subscribe for more game-changing conversations and remember the only thing standing between you and your business breakthrough is the decision to screw it and just do it