Find Your Free Spirit With Feragaia

Cocktails Distilled

We thought we would start our podcast year off by talking to one of Scotland's best-known no-alc distilled spirits, Feragaia.
You've probably seen a lot about no and low-alc spirits through dry January, but if the 2024 Bacardi Cocktail Trends Report is to be believed, you're about to hear a lot more.
The report predicts that the sector will skyrocket by 67% to a value of 359 million by 2026 and that consumers will increasingly seek no and low alternatives year-round.
So, with that in mind, we talked to Bill Garnock, one of the founders of Feragaia, about botanicals, experimentation and what it means to distil the wild earth.

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1. Find Your Free Spirit With Feragaia (00:00:00)

2. You've been distilling Feragaia since 2019. Back then, did you imagine that the category would expand the way that it has? (00:01:40)

3. Has it expanded in the way you thought, though? (00:02:48)

4. I suppose what I was getting at is whether the non-alcoholic category should be what you and companies like Seedlip are doing, or should it be mimicking existing alcohol but without any alcohol incorporated? Or is there room in the market for both? (00:03:58)

5. When you look at alcohol categories, if somebody orders a whiskey or somebody orders a gin, they know what they're getting. But when somebody orders a no-alcohol cocktail or goes out to buy a non-alcoholic ferret, they don't really understand what the fla (00:05:57)

6. When somebody hasn't tasted Feragaia before, how do you describe it to them? (00:08:18)

7. Coming from a land that is famed for its whiskey, how difficult has it been to get that no-alc message across? (00:10:15)

8. Let's talk about some of your botanicals. Was it your aim to ensure that the liquid had a Scottish terroir? (00:12:51)

9. Talk to us about the experimentation you needed to go through to arrive at the 14 botanicals that you ended up using. Was it a bit of a process? (00:15:56)

10. It must be a bit of a nightmare to balance the delicate flavours and the citrus flavours with flavours that are a lot stronger and earthier from the root botanicals and spices? (00:19:25)

11. If you're continuing to experiment and tweak the recipe, is that something that's going to continuously go on, or are you at any stage going to turn your attention to other expressions? (00:21:06)

12. You've had five years of showing bartenders your liquid. What sort of unusual drinks have they come up with that you've seen? (00:24:15)

13. No, you've been talking a lot about Old Fashioneds, and if you have a look at your website, most of the cocktails show a non-alcohol variation to an existing alcohol-based drink. Is that the way you want consumers to approach the liquid? (00:26:18)