Say goodbye to furry teeth - finding our magic ingredient

The hardest part of our recipe development was getting the sweetness right.

Ginger is naturally bitter, and lemons are naturally sour, so drinks brands fill their products full of sugar to counteract the strong flavour profiles.

In the alcohol industry, you don’t legally have to disclose calories or ingredients, so it’s hard to pin-point exactly how much sugar is in a 500ml bottle of Crabbies or Hooch, but sources such as Nutracheck and Fatsecret UK estimate between 30g and 40g per 500ml.

The result? One-and-done drinks that leave you with that sugary film covering your teeth.

So, we knew what we did and didn’t want – sweetness but without the furry teeth sensation.

The first option was sucrose. Sucrose is basically your bog-standard table sugar and the benchmark for sweetness comparisons. It’s found naturally in fruits and veggies, so fit in perfectly with our all-natural strategy. It doesn’t pack the sweet punch needed to counteract the bitterness and sourness of the other ingredients though, unless we wanted the same sugar and calorie levels as competitors. So, it was back to the drawing board.

Next up – fructose. Fructose is another natural sugar, found in fruits, honey and some veggies. It is, however, sweeter than sucrose (about 1.7x). Without geeking out too hard on the science of it, that’s because fructose binds more effectively to human’s sweet taste receptors, sending stronger sweet signals to the brain compared to sucrose. So, we swapped out the sucrose for fructose and ended up getting a lot closer to our preferred sweetness levels.

It wasn’t quite there though, and we were at the upper limits of our preferred calorie and sugar content for the alcoholic ginger beer.

Then the conversations switched to sweeteners. Artificial sweeteners were always a no-go, so research began on the potential natural sweeteners we could use to top up the sweetness.

One option was erythritol. This is a sweetener made from the fermentation of natural sugars, like glucose, using yeast or fungi. It’s used across the UK, but there was something that didn’t sit right with us. If you use erythritol in your products and it makes up 10% of the product (ours would never get to this level, but still) you had to disclose on your products that excessive consumption may cause laxative effects. Imagine, mid-crisp alcoholic ginger beer in the pub garden and you suddenly have to sprint to the bathroom (or worse, you don’t make it). Far from an ideal Saturday afternoon. Next idea.

Then the news hit. Monk fruit – which has been used across the globe for donkeys – could now be used in commercial production in the UK. Why wasn’t it used before 2024? Well, because it was classified as a “novel” food. Regulations set in 1997 dictated that if there wasn’t wide use of an ingredient in the UK then it was novel and couldn’t be used in commercial food and beverage applications. Didn’t make sense to us either.

But if you look at the labels of any Australian foods/beverages that champion sugar-reduced or clean-labelled products, you’ll see monk fruit. Why? Because not only is it 150-250 times sweeter than table sugar, but it also has zero calories. Cue the geek out again… and that’s because it’s made up of compounds that aren’t metabolised for energy by the body.

Win win then – we get the sweetness we’re after but without excessive sugar content or increased calories. Big up monk fruit.