Is Sylva the first good no-lo whisky?

It’s almost 10 years since the teetotal graphic designer Ben Branson launched his game-changing product Seedlip, a non-alcoholic botanical “spirit” audaciously styled and priced like a craft gin. People scoffed at the time, but it paved the way for a whole new drinks category – according to IWSR, “volumes of no-alcohol spirits now comfortably surpass those of tequila in the UK”.

Branson sold a majority stake in Seedlip to Diageo in 2019, and by the looks of his 25-acre neo-Gothic pile in Essex, he did rather well out of it. Now the 41-year-old has set his sights on the dark spirits category. His new brand, Sylva, is a range of less than 0.5 per cent abv dark “spirits” that take cues from rum, cognac and whisky, but also throw a host of new technologies and ingredients into the mix. The hope is to create flavour profiles that are not possible (or, sometimes, permitted) in more traditional spirits.

The brand’s name means “wood” in Old English – and wood-ageing is a particular focus. “Up to 70 per cent of a dark spirit’s flavour comes from its barrel,” says Branson. While spirits like Scotch whisky and Bourbon can only legally be matured in oak barrels, in non-alc there are no such rules. And by using sonic maturation techniques – which use ultrasonic soundwaves of up to 40,000 hertz to accelerate the interaction between liquid and wood – Branson can achieve in days barrel-ageing effects that would normally take years.

I tasted a prototype Sylva, a vacuum-distilled rye spirit, sonic-aged with four types of wood: African padauk, a hard wood with the colour and flavour of paprika; olive wood; birch-toasted red oak from Sylva’s own forest; and oak barrel staves from Nc’nean distillery that impart a caramelised flavour more reminiscent of Scotch whisky. They also add a bit of glycerine for body and sweetness. (The trace of alcohol in Sylva is due to a small amount of ethanol used in the distillation of the grain.)

The liquid has the amber colour of whisky, and far more balance and complexity than any other non-alc dark spirit I’ve tasted. The inclusion of woody notes other than oak is also intriguing. The liquid lacks a bit of weight, though. And, I confess, I missed the heat. “We are looking at various trigeminal options to recreate that,” says Sylva’s head of R&D, Jack Wareing (formerly of World’s Best Bar winner Dandelyan).

It’s no substitute for whisky – at least, not yet. But as we pore over Sylva’s wood inventory – watermelon-coloured pink ivory wood, mango, black walnut, sugar maple and hawthorne – I can’t help but be excited by the possibilities. Branson is also working with Groove Armada musician Andy Cato’s agriculture project Wildfarmed to source regenerative grain varieties. Every Sylva release will be a limited-edition recipe of between 2,000 and 4,900 bottles. Priced at £40 per 50cl, it costs more than many single malt whiskies.

It begs the question: what do you pay for when you buy a bottle of spirits? The brand, the ingredients, the expertise, the time it’s spent on the earth – or just the alcohol? It will be interesting to see if the man from Seedlip can find the answer. 

@alicelascelles