Tiff:
While a lot of us did drink, perhaps a little more than we should have, during the pandemic, the real winner from our time of isolation was the non alcoholic drinks industry. Already picking up steam before COVID, the sale of non alcoholic beverages has skyrocketed over the last 18 months. One relatively new brand to the market but one that has definitely been making an impact is Everleaf, a complex and captivating range of non alcoholic aperitifs based in the UK. To find out more about the brand, what they are offering and the true nature of the appeal, we talk to Paul Mathew, the founder of Everleaf.
Thanks for joining us, Paul.

Paul Mathew:
Thank you very much for having me on.

Tiff:
Now, how did a conservation biologist, as was your trade before, end up making non alcoholic aperitifs?

Paul Mathew:
It's been a bit of a journey I guess, hasn't it, when you put it like that. So, yes, my academic background was conservation biology and I spent almost 10 years working for conservation charities, starting at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and for a lot of my time working for Fauna & Flora International, a conservation charity based in Cambridge. But I was always working in bars in my spare time at night, I started working in bars to pay my way through studies and then just carried on because I really enjoyed it. And eventually, after about 10 years of conservation, I left to open my own bar.
So I opened up a bar on Bermondsey Street in London, 15 years ago now, which is... it's been quite a journey I guess, 15 years. And then we opened another couple... Oh, what was it? About seven years after that? So we've got three bars in London and various other twists and turns on the journey, but essentially Everleaf was something I wanted to do to combine those two parts of my life, the conservation biology and the bartending, but also to meet the needs of what we were seeing from our bars. We were just getting more and more people wanting low and no serves, and I wanted to have interesting things to serve them.

Tiff:
Yeah, I was about to say a lot of people would've perhaps got into gin for the use of the botanicals, what was it particularly about non alcoholic that interested you?

Paul Mathew:
Well, I did think about getting into gin not long after we opened The Hide, and we had various distillers coming through and the gin craze, I guess, as you might call it, was starting. And I was quite excited at the prospect of using botanicals to make a gin, but didn't have any money at all having sold everything I had to buy the bar, so it wasn't really on the cards then. But I think what really excited me about the non-alc space was, for one just the novelty of it and people finding their way and exploring the category, but also how I could use plants to add more to it. Because it's really not the same as making a traditional distilled product, and we use plants to try and overcome some of the hurdles of non-alc, such as texture. So it was a really, really exciting challenge to work on.

Tiff:
Now, it is an area of the industry that is picking up an enormous amount of steam, with a variety of people doing either products that mimic alcohol or products that are completely alienated from alcohol. What made you think that the category needed another brand?

Paul Mathew:
Well, we actually launched a little over three years ago now, so in Dry Jan 2019. So we were reasonably early into it, and at the time there was obviously Seedlip and we had some other pretty much gin replacement style products. I think Atopia had launched and Cedars had launched, but they're all very much of the same character. And for me as a bartender, it was like having a bar where you only had gin on the back bar to play with, so I wanted a bit of diversity coming into the category.
I also wanted something that wasn't trying to be something else, I wanted to make it unique and interesting for bartenders to use. So I think what we've tried to do with Everleaf is make something that is hopefully a great product in its own right, and isn't a, "Well, if you're not drinking, drink this." It's hopefully something that's delicious, whatever the occasion. And we've been delighted to see bartenders using it in alcoholic drinks as well as non alcoholic drinks, because for me that's, if you like, the badge of acceptance that it's a decent product and not just something you use when you're not drinking.

Tiff:
Now, you have three expressions, the Forest, Marine, and Mountain. Do you want to talk us through the flavours of each of these?

Paul Mathew:
Yeah, absolutely. We originally launched just with Everleaf, which has turned into Forest as we've developed the ecosystem, if you like. So with Forest, I was looking for all those bittersweet, earthy flavours that I like as a bartender, so a lot of aperitifs, digestifs, the amaros and vermouths, really looking at what went into them but also trying to add a few ingredients that really interested me as a bartender, working out how we could make it familiar but different, if you like.
So Forest is really on that bittersweet flavour spectrum, so we use... Well, for me, it's built out of three parts. We have the canopy, the bit under the canopy between the tops of the trees and the ground, and then the earthy ground itself. So with the canopy the journey starts with all those floral aromatics, so we use things like orange blossom in there, we've got a little bit of vetiver root, which adds a citrusy, earthy note to it. We use a few things that are more traditional for perfumery, I guess, and we bind all that together with orris root, as gin does as well, but that also adds a little note on the nose.
And then as you come down through the Forest, we've got all those epiphytes that grow off the trees, we've got the barks of the trees, so we've got cinnamon and cassia, we've got vanilla from orchids that grow in that level under the canopy. And then as you come down to the roots we've got, as I say, orris root, we've got liquorice root, angelica root, backed up with gentian as a strong bittering agent. So it's designed to take you on this journey through a forest and what flavours you might encounter. So that's Forest really, and the journey through there.

Tiff:
That's a lovely way to think of it actually, is those three divisions, and making your way from top to bottom through the forest is a lovely analogy.

Paul Mathew:
Yeah, as a bartender I always think of every cocktail I make as being the different components, what hits you first, how it's presented, what the aroma is, what the colour is, and then how it hits your palette is very much the beginning, middle and end. So that's what I wanted to try and... I guess my process for working through the development of these flavours as well. And then after 18 months, well, after about a year we started work on the other two and they were launched getting on for two years after the first one. And with that I'd wanted to try and expand into these different biomes and talk about some of the plants that were from there, but also what kind of emotions you have.
And with Mountain, again, we're looking at a vermouth style flavour profile, bittersweet, lots of aromatics. And I spent a few years working in China and Asia, and for me cycling up through mountains when the cherry blossom was in flower in the spring was such a emotive thing, as well as hiking and walking back home in the UK as well, so wanted to try and put all those things together. So we start off at the bottom of the valley where you've got cherry blossom, and we use a Japanese cherry blossom to do that, which is a really heady scent but also quite savoury, it's fermented cherry blossom.
And then as you go up the side of the mountain, you maybe pick some wild strawberries, so we've got that little bit of strawberry note in there to sweeten it without it being a sweet fruit bond, it's definitely not that. And then as you get higher we've got little bits of wormwood coming in, maybe find those by the side of the path, and then at the top we've got a much colder climate and you've got rose hips coming in to add the bitterness and that little bit of tartness to it as well. So again, you've got this journey through a fictional ecosystem, you'd never get all those things available to you at the same time, but it's trying to capture a journey and an impression.
And then finally we've got Marine. Marine's, I guess, the freshest of the three flavours. It's the most gin like, if you were going to compare it to anything, but it's definitely not trying to be gin. And that again, super emotive. You've mentioned your move, one of the things that I've enjoyed watching over lockdown was My Octopus Teacher based on kelp forest biomes in South Africa. And if you imagine swimming through a kelp forest, that's the first hit of Marine, we use kelp and we use dulse seaweeds as well. So as you go through... I love swimming through kelp forests, because every time you part the fronds of the kelp or the stipes of the kelp you see more things appearing. You see shoals of fish, or you might see an octopus, or you see the shellfish on the bottom, or you see what's living on the kelp fronds themselves, or you see things above you on the surface of the water. So for me they're incredibly exciting bio diverse places.
So Marine tries to capture that, it's got a little bit of that salty freshness you get it in the back of your nose after you've been messing around in the sea for ages. And then the follow up to that is lying back on the beach and having all those coastal scents waft over you. So we've got a little bit of olive leaf, which for me is a very Mediterranean kind of scent from the coast. We've got a little bit of thyme, because you often get these aromatic herbs growing by the side of the coast. A big part of it is bergamot, so you've got citrus coming in from bergamot, and again, we use a Calabrian bergamot. It's a very Mediterranean kind of... all those warming smells you might get after lying back on the beach, having been swimming for a while.
And then we use another couple of things to accentuate that, there's a touch of eucalyptus, which gives that fresh sea breeze or sea spray kind of notes, I think, a touch of pine. So all these kind of things that try and create a biome in your head, hopefully, when you're drinking it.

Tiff:
How did you go about creating these expressions? Did you tinker with the recipes yourself or did you just come up with the concepts and take it to someone else to develop?

Paul Mathew:
Oh, no, I've developed all these myself. Initially that was digging things up in the garden, dehydrating them, grinding things up with a pestle and mortar, very bartender style, seeing what things worked out at the bar. Testing different botanicals, switching one out, switching another out. I talked about the texture, so for me it was looking at what plants could give texture or mouth feel, because that's such an important part of what we drink in the world of alcohol but we don't necessarily notice it. But I really felt that it was lacking in some of the other non alcs I was drinking, so for me it was important to try and get a weight, a texture, a smoothness, which not only resonates on your palette directly but it also helps the other flavours to develop on your palette by slowing the flow of the liquid over.
So I looked all sorts of things from... There's a drink that's made across that southern Mediterranean and into Turkey called salep. It's made from ground up orchid tubers which have this texture in them, they absorb vast quantities of water and make quite a thick gluey substance. So I tried some recipes for that, I dug up some orchid's from dad's garden and ground them up, played around with all sorts of different things but in that particular case we couldn't find a sustainable source. So what we've ended up using is a mixture of seaweed extracts that carrageenan texture and gum acacia sustainably sourced from the Sahel region of Africa, which is I guess more common used by bartenders for gum syrup. So yeah, it was very much a bartender style process of finding things and playing around with them, and that was a good year of experimenting to do that.

Tiff:
I'm always fascinated by people who construct their own products and then have to actually scale them up for commercial use. Because it's never just a case of multiplying by 10 because everything goes slightly out of whack, so it's finessing the flavour to try and get the same thing on a bigger scale.

Paul Mathew:
That's such a good question and really astute to pick up on, because it's been a huge challenge, particularly with non alc. If you look at alcoholic products, I could be making a home vermouth in the bar and that would be pretty straightforward, but to scale it up is a totally different prospect altogether. And with non alc you have the added issue that you have to have shelf life and longevity, before it's open and after it's open. So that was a point where I had to get some help in, and I've had some help from flavour scientists to work out how best to convert what I was making essentially for the bar, where you make something on a Monday and it's used up by the weekend so you don't really have to worry about shelf life and longevity or how stable the flavours are, through to something that could sit on the shelf in a supermarket potentially, or on the back bar where it's changing temperature all the time.
So that was a really exciting process for me actually, it was really fascinating to learn more about flavour science and food science. Because essentially with non alcs you are looking more at food than you are at drink, alcohol is such a great preservative and such a great stabiliser for flavour. Perfumes are alcohol based because it's a great solvent and it's great at stabilising them. So without that there are all sorts of challenges, and you hear this from all non alc producers that, "Well, it's expensive because it's really expensive to make, and it's really challenging to make and it's not easy." I know it sounds like we're just making excuses, but actually it's really not. And looking at all the different stages from what pasteurisation does to the aromatics through to how do we get light sensitivity sorted on shelf, through to what's the fade of different botanicals like over time in the bottle, so how can we mitigate that when we first make it. It's been a long process.

Tiff:
Now, if someone was buying one of your expressions for the first time, how would you want them to first experience it? Should they try it neat? Or should they take it into a cocktail right from the start?

Paul Mathew:
As a bartender, the first thing I do with any new thing is to pour a bit out and smell it and taste it neat, so I totally get anybody that wants to do that. And I think we are really proud of the liquid, so please go ahead and give it a try like that. But what we recommend to everybody is to just try it in a spritz first of all. So I wanted to just make something that was super easy to make a complex drink from, if you like, so anybody could take it off the shelf and mix it with a light tonic water or a soda, or even with Prosecco, with ice, with a garnish, and they've got a great refreshing, complex drink that hopefully is just as rewarding as an alcoholic one, for all those times when you don't necessarily want to drink alcohol. But then beyond that, hopefully it has lots of things to give the bartender that wants to experiment a bit more.

Tiff:
And what have bartenders been making when they've been experimenting with your products?

Paul Mathew:
We've had all sorts actually. Marine has quite a lot of umami in it from the seaweed, a little bit of salinity to it as well, so we've seen people use that with savoury ingredients like tomato juice in Red Snapper style cocktails, but we've also seen bartenders use that in martinis instead of vermouth to add a umami type note. And it doesn't really decrease the ABV a lot of a martini, but it adds a fresh seaweedy note. So we've got a lot of seafood restaurants and bars near the coast using that in their martinis. There's also the Blue Bar at The Berkeley Hotel in London, for example, serve it with a martini made with that and an oyster on the side, so that's been great to see.
With Mountain you can pull out the strawberry notes, so we've had people making sours with it with fresh strawberries, for example, or you can really use it more like a vermouth in a Negroni, because it has that wormwood bitterness component. And then with Forest, lots of people using it as a spritz, which is I guess the most obvious thing with that bittersweet flavour profile. But everything from sours that draw out the vanilla notes, through to Pornstar Martini style drinks, again with the vanilla, through to drinks that might more commonly use something like Size because it's got that gentian bitterness. So really, I think when you have a complex thing with a lot of botanicals it's easy to pull out different components depending on what you want to try and create. And that's I think why I'm still not remotely bored of drinking them after three years of daily tastings, because there's always something new to discover and there's always something else that comes out.

Tiff:
Now, as you mentioned earlier, you started the brand in 2019. It wouldn't have been long before the pandemic hit, how did the brand cope through that period?

Paul Mathew:
Yeah, that was a challenging time. Being a bartender, my first port of call was other bartenders, so we really grew the brand in the on-trade and had some great bartenders and some great bars adopt us really early on. So it was a really positive time in January 2020, with lots of great listings, lots of stuff going on around Dry January, my bars were doing all right as well. And then all of a sudden the world changed, as we know, in quite a major way. And immediately it was a case of having to close our bars and work out what on earth we were going to do there, which took my focus away from Everleaf a bit. But also we were 80% on-trade with Everleaf, so all of a sudden four fifths of our business dried up overnight and we had suppliers sending bottles back saying, "Can you refund us? We haven't got anyone to sell them to now."
So it was a really challenging period. But then I think after the initial lockdown things started to settle out, and we had a period of about three weeks after lockdown was announced where I think everyone was just drinking every night. It was like, "Okay, I don't have to go in to work, every night's a Friday, let's crack open a bottle. The world's stressful, let's have a drink." But quickly we started to see that changing, and I think people realised after a few weeks that, "Okay, this maybe isn't great, I'm drinking too much. It's not very sustainable, we don't know how this is going to last. It's not great for my mental health with everything else going on." And our online sales really started to pick up, and we ended up after a few months being completely switched around and doing a similar volume, but 80% direct to consumers rather than through bars and restaurants.
And then we've been on a rollercoaster ever since really, because the on-trade's opened up and it's closed again, and it's opened up again. We're finally starting to see things get back to normal, in the UK certainly, and fortunately we've kept quite a lot of that direct to consumer trade and we've got the bar business back as well. So I'm really excited about what this year's got to offer. And I hope as, certainly in the northern hemisphere, we come towards spring and summer that everybody's able to start getting out and we can start selling people spritzes in the sun.

Tiff:
Have you got most of your on-trade business back again? Or has it been a bit of a slow process to get the bars back on board?

Paul Mathew:
It hasn't actually, it's been really, I think, quicker than we expected to start getting the bars back on board. People were really quite excited about the product originally, and so we've had a lot of great conversations, but also a lot more bars now are trying to improve their no and low options. And we've had a lot more positive conversations than maybe we would've had three years ago, with more mainstream venues I guess, saying, "Well, yeah, absolutely, we really need to have good low and no options for our guests. What's out there?" And we are lucky to have won a lot of great awards so it's quite an easy conversation to say, "Well, have one of the best, here you go. We're happy to taste against anything else you might have."

Tiff:
Now, as you were shifting towards consumers during the lockdowns, did you find that you needed to do a lot of education around the brand?

Paul Mathew:
I think one of our biggest challenges has been explaining what Everleaf is, because if you are a non alcoholic gin alternative or a non alcoholic rum alternative it's super easy for regular consumers to just say, "Oh, okay, well, I'm not drinking, I'm going to drink the same as I normally drink, but a non alcoholic version." So with non alc beer as well it's similar, but we are trying to be a non alc style of drink that people aren't entirely familiar with anyway. Listeners here will be very familiar with vermouths and amaros and all the different categories of drinks that are out there, but your regular consumer in the supermarket maybe isn't that aware of what an aperitif is to start with, and then for us to say we're a non alcoholic aperitif is a bit of a conversation. And then, "Okay, it's an aperitif. Well, what do I do with it then, how do I serve it?" So we do need to do more education than some other brands out there, I think, but it's also a great opportunity to tell people more about the brand and to tell a bit of our story.
We are a bit more of a complex thing than some out there and in a way that's our strength as well. We have more depth to the story, we talk a lot about sustainability and where the botanicals are coming from, we're happy to talk about our methodology, we talk about more interesting cocktails. So if people want to delve a bit deeper into what makes Everleaf Everleaf, then there are those layers of the onion to peel back, and there's more to it. So hopefully in the long run it's a benefit, although in the immediate short term it means there's more of a conversation to be had.

Tiff:
Now, speaking of that, your mission is all about promoting the conservation of plant biodiversity. Tell us a little bit more about how that works.

Paul Mathew:
Working for conservation charities I was always focused on plants, my father was a botanist all his career so I inherited that from him. And my studies were initially on plants and then a lot of the work I did for conservation charities was around plants, and I worked on something called the Global Trees Campaign to conserve threatened tree species. But whatever we did in conservation all came down to the plants and the habitats, because even if you're trying to save a tiger or a giant panda, or whatever kind of charismatic animal you're picking, they're reliant on the habitat that they live in, they're reliant on the plants at the end of the day. So for me it was always like, why don't people talk more about the plants? So I guess what I'm trying to do is to communicate that a little bit and say, "Plants are absolutely fundamental to any other conservation work we do." If you want to conserve rainforests, if you want to conserve whatever sort of habitat you're working on, plants are the bedrock of that, and having so many of them in Everleaf is a chance to tell the story.
So whether that's vanilla and sourcing from fully traceable, small farms in Madagascar, through what is quite a challenging supply chain, through to the gum acacia that adds texture to all of them and how The Great Green Wall of trees that's being planted across the Sahel region of Africa is helping to combat desertification, through to... There are just so many stories with plants that I'm dying to tell, so one of the things is to tell those stories, another bit of it is to help support charities that are doing work there. So we're a member of One Percent for the Planet, we give that through Fauna & Flora International, who I used to work for. But also, looking at sustainability from a wider perspective with the brand and trying to work out how everything we do can be a little bit better. But part of it's awareness raising, part of it's direct giving and part of it is wider sustainability initiatives.

Tiff:
Now, you mentioned that the Marine and the Mountain were created about two years ago. Does that mean that there's possibly a new expression in the works at the moment?

Paul Mathew:
I would love to be experimenting and releasing all sorts of new things, and I'd love to take the concept of biomes wider and do things like coral reefs or deserts. I've got all sorts of ideas but I need to not break us too early on, we've had so many challenges over the last couple of years that I think we're going to stay put for the moment and try and work with what we've got, and communicate and learn what's working and what isn't working, and then maybe we can go from there. But yeah, absolutely full of ideas, and there are many, many plants out there in the world that are delicious and exciting and have stories to tell, so I would love to use more in the future.

Tiff:
Now, what do you see as the future of the category?

Paul Mathew:
I think one of the things I hope happens is that the line between alc and non alc is blurred a little bit more. It's almost a 'them' and 'us' at the moment, and it's, "Oh, they're non alc products, we're going to put those over here. And these are the alcoholic products. And if we're doing a cocktail list we're going to put non alcoholic things at the bottom out of the way, and then these are the alcoholic ones." I think what's really nice is to blur that boundary and to see all of these as being great products that can be used together, or they can be used separately. And just to blur that boundary of, these are all aperitifs, some of them have alcohol, some of them don't have alcohol. These are all clear botanical spirits, some of them have alcohol, some of them don't have alcohol. These are barrel-aged things, some of them have alcohol, some of them don't have alcohol.
I'd really like to see that starting to happen, so that you go to a bar for a great drink and some of those great drinks have alcohol and some of those great drinks don't have alcohol. And some of them are somewhere in between and don't have too much, but it's there for a purpose. We don't eat for energy and food, we eat for the pleasure of eating, by and large, and likewise, we don't drink for the alcohol to get drunk, we drink for the pleasure of drinking. Hopefully, I mean, there's obviously exceptions there.
But on the whole, yeah. I really want people to enjoy their drinks whether or not alcohol is part of that. Hopefully it isn't the deciding factor going forwards.

Tiff:
So that was what you were referring to earlier when you were talking about bartenders using the products in alcoholic drinks.

Paul Mathew:
The thing I've been really pleased to see about the development of the category, is bartenders using non alc in alc, because that shows a wider acceptance of it, and the fact that these products are good enough to be used wherever, they stand their ground on the back bar.

Tiff:
So the brand is available in Marks & Spencer's and some pretty high end cocktail bars, what are the plans for the future in terms of export and local availability?

Paul Mathew:
Well, we've gone into a few international markets already, which is really exciting. So we're in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, we have some stock in the UAE at the moment and some in Iceland, so we're kind of putting out feelers and seeing how it does. We have been historically a little constrained with production, but we're hopefully getting to the bottom of that now and so we have stock available for other places, and it's great to see how it's been being adopted there so that's really exciting. In the UK, we're growing the number of on-trade outlets by the day, and it's incredible now the number we're in, I think it's 700 or 800 different places that are stocking us at the moment, which is fantastic. The relationship we have with Marks & Spencer's has been brilliant, so it's great to be able to tell people that they can just pop into a local supermarket there and pick one up.
And e-com is a really interesting channel for us as well, and we're looking at how we can maximise awareness that we're available easily online too, because that gives us another opportunity to tell a bit of the Everleaf story to people. Because, like I say, we've got all these different layers to it and it's a great place to be able to tell people about those layers online.

Tiff:
Out of curiosity, which of the three is the most popular?

Paul Mathew:
That's an interesting question because it really varies depending on which stream we're looking at. So Forest is really popular amongst bartenders, I think because it's the strongest flavour and the most unique. Marine is really popular whenever we're doing events and people are tasting on our stand. So I think also particularly that journey that we talk of for the Marine, swimming through the sea and then lying back on the beach is a very emotive one, so that does really well then. And Mountain really well online, I think the beautiful colour of it and some of the blossom that we talk about there is really popular. So I think Forest and Mountain slightly ahead of Marine at the moment, but all doing well. It's really, really good to see.

Tiff:
Now if people want more information they can go to your website, which is everleafdrinks.com, or connect with the brand on your socials.

Paul Mathew:
Yeah, absolutely. We're everleafdrinks on most social channels, I'm everleaf_paul, so we're easy to find, really interested to engage with people online as well. So please get in touch and take a look and ask us any questions you'd like, I'm really happy to be transparent and honest about any part of the business, so just drop me line and I'm happy to help.

Tiff:
Well, it was great speaking with you, Paul. So thank you so much for taking the time and taking us on a journey through your microbiomes.

Paul Mathew:
Thanks very much, Tiff, it's been great to talk to you.

Tiff:
Excellent, thank you.