As this year marks the 100th year of the Negroni, you’ve got to wonder what Count Camillo Negroni, the guy who started it all, would think of the NOgroni.
It’s almost poetic to think that the same man who asked his barman to swap the soda in his Americano for gin would, in this modern age, be likely to ask for the alcohol in his drink to be swapped out for a non-alcoholic twist.
“It’s great to honour that very historic cocktail in our own particular way,” said Clare Warner, the Managing Director of Æcorn Aperitifs. “We really want to champion this drink and make it the most famous non-alcoholic cocktail in the world.
“It felt appropriate that we could take the component ingredients, put them together and present them beautifully in a ready-to-serve that would take that drink to more people in the very year that we are all celebrating this fantastic cocktail.”
While the Negroni may have a century of history behind it, the NOgroni is making a little history of its own. Two years ago, the non-alcoholic drink debuted at the World’s 50 Best Bar Awards and this month, exactly two years later, the cocktail has been released as a pre-bottled concept.
In an Izakaya alley-style venue in London’s Shoreditch, where the organisers of London Cocktail Week assembled 40 pop-up cocktail bars, the bottled NOgroni was a standout. A perfectly balanced blend of Seedlip Spice 94, Æcorn Bitters and Æcorn Aromatic, the bottled version of the drink with its stylish packaging proved a popular draw.
“We wanted to make it as easy and accessible as possible” explained Warner. “There are still some barriers around making cocktails but we wanted to create something everyone could enjoy. Essentially, it was super appealing to give people the ability to have a complex adult cocktail wherever they may be.”
The NOgroni, in its unbottled version, has proved extremely popular and appeared on the bar lists of several top bars around the world. The bottled version, with its rule of thirds- style packaging, is showing early signs that the brand’s first foray in ready-to-drink (RTD) offerings has been a home run.
Pearlfisher, the New York design agency that created the packing for Seedlip and earlier this year for its sister brand Æcorn, have utilized the recognizable brand elements from each of the three ingredients – the nature-inspired colour palette, font style and symbols – to communicate the NOgroni in simple terms.
“It uses just three very simple colours that echo the colour palette of Seedlip and Æcorn in a very complementary way,” said Warner, “with a very elegant design.”
But things weren’t always so simple for the NOgroni. Warner explained that it was only since the release of Æcorn Aperitifs that the drink could really be easily constructed. When the drink was originally conceived, by Seedlip founder Ben Branson in his garage, the recipe was very different.
“It started off with a base of Seedlip spice but added a non-alcoholic sweet vermouth equivalent and a non-alcoholic sort of Italian amaro equivalent, which he made himself.
“Those two equivalent ingredients contained upwards of 40 ingredients. They took 24 hours to make, they were really complicated to do and even more complicated to replicate. And so when we launched Acorn six months ago, it was just waiting to happen, that we would put those three ingredients together to make a very simple, really beautiful, consistent NOgroni.
And that combination bitter & citrusy blend with hints of Chinotto Orange, Grapefruit, All Spice & Gentian, meant the drink has truly resonated with the growing number of people who were looking to solve the ever-growing dilemma of what to drink when you’re not drinking.
“When Ben launched Seedlip nearly four years ago, it was one of the cocktails that really sort of put Seedlip on the map and it was the first cocktail that they really were promoting as a fantastic non-alcohol alternative to the Negroni.“
With the simple swap of one vowel for another, NOgroni’s name has become a clever suggestion of a Negroni cocktail without liquor. This personality is continued in the identity where the diagonal detail in the ‘O’ doubles as a “no” symbol to represent the zero percent alcohol level or a cocktail stirrer sitting in a glass being viewed from above.
The hope, of course, is that the NOgroni will come to rival its namesake and ultimately be among the most famous cocktails in the world. For the moment though, the bottled cocktail is building up its fan base slowly.
“For the time being, it’s a UK exclusive and we’ll see how it goes in order to think about how to make it a wider release,” said Warner.
Of course, if the bottled version hasn’t come to your market yet you can always make it yourself –
Ingredients
1oz Seedlip Spiced
0.8oz Æcorn Aromatic
0.8oz Æcorn Bitter
Instructions
Build it all in the Old-Fashioned Glass & add an Orange Twist as garnish.
NOgroni is available to buy from Selfridges London and the seedlipdrinks.com website.
