Recent years have seen trends toward mindful drinking and low- or no-alcohol options across the drinks industry, including in spirits. Now, a small but growing selection of spirit brands are carving out a middle ground between alcohol-free and conventional spirits with gin, vodka, and tequila alternatives at about half the strength of conventional spirits, or lower.
In a report conducted by the research firm KAM in collaboration with the Mid-Strength Collective—composed of mid-strength alcohol brands based in the United Kingdom—a third of consumers said they felt that having mid-strength options available in bars could enhance the social experience.
“We don’t want people to interpret this as a simple dilution,” says Fabian Clark, cofounder of the London-based Quarter Proof. Clark launched the brand in 2022, making it among the first entrants to this growing market. Especially in the past year, however, the team has noticed a groundswell toward moderation.
“We work directly with the on-premise and bar managers who believe in the category and want to offer their consumers choice,” Clark says.
Yet finding footing in a brand-new category isn’t easy. “After extensive research, we’ve realized that our consumers are regular alcohol drinkers,” he says. Based on that research, Clark decided that the team should market the product more like full-strength spirits.
No Need to “Zebra-Stripe”
At Session Spirit, another mid-strength brand, CEO and cofounder Brad Crompton says Europe’s aperitivo culture inspired the idea for a lower-ABV spirit—the cofounders wanted to create something similar that would resonate in the United Kingdom. For now, the brand is mostly focused on selling direct-to-consumer, which Crompton feels is the best way to get buy-in.
“It’s easier to educate people directly than it is through on-trade,” he says. That education is especially important because labeling and regulation remain a gray area: They aren’t allowed to call the product “gin”—instead, they describe it as “made with London dry gin.”
“Alcohol-free was born from a need, whereas mid-strength is born from a desire,” Crompton says. He also notes that mid-strength spirits provide an alternative to “zebra-striping”—that’s the practice of alternating between alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages, especially at social occasions.
Mid-strength spirit, he says, “gives you the moderation that you’re after without having to sacrifice flavor, taste, serving size, consistent experience.” It also offers flexibility—for example, to enjoy the same number of drinks while reducing alcohol intake, or to consume roughly the same amount of alcohol but spread across more drinks and a longer evening.
Industry-backed consumer research suggests that many people value that flexibility. In the KAM study, half the respondents said they’d rather have two mid-strength drinks than one full-strength drink.
For now, however, education is an obstacle. Crompton says people sometimes ask him why they wouldn’t simply pour less gin into, say, a gin and tonic.
His answer: Mid-strength is about not compromising on serving size or taste.
The Move toward Moderation
The United States is also seeing a shift toward more moderate drinking. According to consumer research firm IWSR, among U.S. consumers who drink, more than half say they are moderating their consumption of alcohol.
Jimmy Cosma, cofounder and CEO of Chicago-based Sommarøy Spirits, says a friend approached him during the pandemic about the idea of lighter spirits. As the vision and brand took shape, one of the challenges before launch was finalizing the labels.
“Initially, when we submitted our labels for approval to the TTB … I had listed it as ‘light gin’ and ‘light vodka,’” Cosma says. The TTB rejected those labels and suggested a different approach to place the spirits in a sub-category, using the modifier “with natural flavor” to work within the TTB’s parameters.
Even with that barrier cleared, Cosma says education is critical to help consumers to understand what the product is—especially because most retailers still place it among the full-strength gins and vodkas. However, he says he sees strong opportunities for the mid-strength category in the on-premise.
“When you start talking to beverage directors or bartenders, they start to understand it a bit faster,” he says. One example of a great on-premise relationship for the brand is Chicago steakhouse Gibsons Italia, where a thriving lunch service means that lighter cocktails are popular.
Cosma says some bartenders have expressed interest in having a lower-ABV bourbon or similar for making old-fashioneds and Manhattans that could be enjoyed with less chance of a fuzzy head the next day. So far, however, Sommarøy doesn’t produce any brown spirits. Cosma says he believes the complexity of whiskey and similar barrel-aged spirits would make that a big technical challenge.
How Mid Is Mid?
So, just how strong are mid-strength spirits? That depends on the brand.
To produce Session Spirit, the brand contracts with a distiller who Crompton says has been making gin for many generations. There was experimentation involved in settling on the product’s ABV of 25 percent—they started at about 28 percent and lowered it, step by step.
“Twenty-five percent seems to be the sweet spot,” Crompton says. They found that this was as low as they could reasonably go before losing the key experiences of the spirit—“the taste, the mouthfeel, the bite, the warmth, everything that makes a gin a gin,” he says.
Sommarøy currently offers a vodka and a gin, both at 27.5 percent ABV. The spirits are made with a 100 percent corn base. “There’s kind of a hint of sweetness to it,” Cosma says. While the original plan was for a product of 20 percent ABV, “what we found in working with our distiller partner was, when you get down that low, it really strips a lot of the interesting complexities of that spirit out.”
So, they ratcheted up the formula to land at 55 proof. The gin is delicate and subtle, Cosma says, incorporating lemon peel and coriander in a botanical blend that’s not too juniper-heavy.
Quarter Proof’s London Dry, Blanco Agave, and Three Grain Spirit—alternatives to gin, tequila, and vodka, respectively—all land at 15 percent ABV.
“We took learnings from the perfume industry and developed a technology called ‘fractionation,’” Clark says. Their distiller partner uses a centrifuge to spin ingredients to extract flavor into individual (alcohol-free) “keys.” After distilling the ferments to about 65 percent ABV, they mix these key flavors to create the desired profile before blending the spirits to bottling strength.
Mid-Strength, not Necessarily Mid-Price
Clark says he and the team are happy with the results—and he emphasizes that the method isn’t cheap.
“This process is much more expensive than traditional spirit production,” he says, “not to mention that we do not currently have the economies of scale that large brands currently have.”
Battling with consumer price expectations is a challenge in the mid-strength category. Naturally, many customers expect that lower-ABV spirits should have a lower price point. But for the small, mid-strength brands seeking to compete with other premium spirits producers, that won’t necessarily be the case.
“Because mid-strength is so new, and because there are so few brands in the space, it really matters who you target,” Crompton says. “We’re a premium-spirit business that just happens to make mid-strength.”