10 Things we learned at Imbibe Live 2024

At the start of July, some of the MoM team attended Imbibe Live, one of the UK’s leading drinks trade shows since it was established in 2010. I hadn’t been to one of these in a while, so it seemed like a good chance to see “what’s new and interesting in the industry” (the primary objective of 33% of visitors I’m told).

Imbibe Live brings together wines, beers, spirits, RTD (‘ready to drink’ i.e. mostly premixed cans), mixers, no-and-low alcohol options, and more (bottle and cork manufacturers, for example). Different suppliers and brands have stands, including many still looking for UK distribution, plus there are masterclasses and expert panels for further insights and trend discussions.

It was also, however, still noticeably quieter in terms of exhibitor and visitor numbers compared to before the pandemic with many of the biggest drinks companies and distributors conspicuously missing. So what can be done to breathe new life into the event?* And what else did we learn regardless?

1. Imbibe Live is changing (and needs to)

As of next year, Imbibe Live will become BCB Bar Convent London, joining Brooklyn, São Paulo and Singapore as part of Bar Convent Berlin’s global exhibitions. Even though Imbibe Live has carried on, the Imbibe UK magazine and website were sadly wound up at the end of 2020 amid COVID-19 pressures. Bringing the event under the umbrella of what has long been Europe’s biggest bar and beverage industry trade fair does therefore look to make a lot of sense going forward. More may need to change than the name (Imbibe and BCB were already owned by the same company), but it feels like a move that returns it to greater relevance.

2. Whisky has gone missing

Glen Turner/La Martiniquaise was there so shout out to them, with whisky specialist Phil Huckle on hand to chat Glen Moray and Cutty Sark. Love Drinks had The Matsui Japanese whisky. Both stands, however, had their rums front and centre. After that…? With the possible exception of Hyde Irish whiskey, I think every other whisky bottle in Olympia was to be found on Estal’s glassware and packaging solutions stand!** Other spirits were underrepresented too, but whisky is obviously our bread and butter around here.

Is an all-of-drinks industry exhibition not a place for ‘fine spirits’? As mentioned, most big companies weren’t in attendance, but when so many whisky brands seemingly wish to be seen as young, hip and mixable, the almost total lack of representation seems off. At least whisky featured in a couple of the masterclasses, although one of those was about how more needs to be done to dismantle whisky’s intimidating/old man image and get it into the hands of more bartenders. So, you know… (More on that in a bit.)

3. Asian spirits can provide deep, umami goodness

Japan and China both provided highlights of the show for me, where fermentations with koji and qū (say ‘chew’) respectively create sometimes wildly different flavour experiences compared to spirits you may be more familiar with. Jake likes Japan. It is known. But I’m somewhat less familiar with baijiu. There are many styles of China’s national spirit, including ‘jiang xiang’ AKA ‘sauce style’ (literally think soy sauce) such as Kweichow Moutai. Never heard of it? You won’t be alone, but they’re one of the most valuable drinks companies on the planet! Bigger than all Diageo supposedly! Most of those sales are in China, of course, but they are trying to branch out. Big, super savoury, and packed with umami character, but also peach and cacao notes. Impressive.

More approachable, adaptable and affordable, however, are the Japanese drinks that featured in Francesco Braun’s ‘Sake, shōchū and awamori in cocktails’ masterclass. Shōchū (which is a spirit) is much bigger in Japan than sake*** and is making inroads internationally. Again there are various styles (raw materials range from sweet potato to barley, rice, or brown sugar), and it benefits from a relatively low abv (20-30%). I say benefits because it not only fits some trends for lower-strength cocktail options, but also New York’s soft liquor licences for example. I’m not sure the latter actually came up in the masterclass, but when some American states have different licences for establishments that serve beer and wine than they do for spirits above 24%, that provides an additional gap for shōchū to really shine. Francesco served us a very Japanese version of the lower abv cocktail classic The Adonis made with shōchū instead of sherry, umeshu in place of the vermouth, and finished with umami bitters. He also served a Miso Gimlet that paired awamori with a roasted pineapple and miso (two tasting notes from the spirit itself) cordial. Umami for the win folks!

4. How to balance flavoured sodas and tonics

I’ve always had a healthy scepticism about flavoured tonics and sodas. In a G&T for example, I generally don’t want a strong flavoured tonic overpowering the carefully distilled and crafted flavours of whichever gin I’m currently obsessed with this week. The painfully simple solution happened to be demonstrated in the Japanese masterclass mentioned above when a tasty chūhai (shōchū highball) with jasmine soda was served. What made this highball work wonderfully was that both regular soda and jasmine soda were used. If you do that you can cut back and balance the flavoured mixer to taste. Balance is within your grasp people.

5. Strength can go down during ageing in Kentucky rickhouses

More just a good factoid this one, thrown in to get us up to ‘10 things’. You’re likely familiar with the fact that if you fill a cask in Scotland and sit around waiting for the angels to take their share then it’s not just the volume that decreases over time, but also the strength of the spirit. That’s why after entering the cask at around 63% abv, you sometimes get very old single malts that are in danger of going under 40% (the minimum for whisky)! Likewise, elsewhere in the world where humidity is lower, the opposite happens. Strength can increase during maturation in places such as Kentucky, Texas, or indeed India.

What the WSET’s Charlie McCarthy and Heaven Hill’s Benji Purslow showed in their masterclass on ‘The surprising impact of oak, time and place in spirits’ was how placement within classic bourbon rickhouses is crucial for different brands. I think Adam plans to write more about that so I won’t reveal all the spoilers, but the interesting additional nugget here is that on the lowest floors of those rickhouses the conditions are relatively moist and cool. Enough, in fact, for the strength to go down during ageing more like we’re used to with Scotch. It’s something you may not have considered before (or perhaps you have, you’re a clever bunch).

6. They got da funk

Whisky may have been in short supply on the stands of Imbibe Live, but as mentioned rum was slightly more prominent. Excitingly, to my tastes at least, that also included plenty of grassy, funky sugar cane juice spirits! There were agricole rhums, some cachaça, and something that specifically piqued our interest: a blend of high ester pot still Jamaican molasses rum and sugar cane juice rum from the Dominican Republic. Erm, yes please… Like nine cans of shaving powder, that’s funky. We sent Nick Morgan on a journey into funk once, if this is all a bit confusing. Now that was an article that truly spoke to me.

Karisimbi White Rum, the blend in question just above, was launched last year by Gorilla Spirits. Adam spoke to Gorilla Spirits founder Andy Daniels about ethical booze back in 2019 when Karisimbi was the name of their spiced rum. Now it’s a whole range of bottled rums. They also distill their own Silverback gins, and produce Maraba coffee liqueurs, donating 10% of the profit from every bottle sold to The Gorilla Organization. According to the charity, there are only 1,069 mountain gorillas left in the world, a sobering thought.

7. Gin & Juice is coming

From da funk we appropriately enough move on to the ultimate Parliament/Funkadelic-inheriting hip-hop Gs. Yes, you could be rolling down the street sippin’ on Dr. Dre & Snoop D-O-double-G’s RTDs. Laaaid back.

They’re set to hit the UK very shortly. Of course, the real problem is that they’re actually hard seltzer things (even if they’re made with gin and juice). Picture the scene, it’s 1994 in LA, Snoop has got his “Seagram’s gin”, and Dr. Dre’s come through with “a gang of Tanqueray”. Somebody else presumably has some juice and cups, but nobody’s talking about whether their party drink is “subtly carbonated with a playfully bubbly, quenching effervescence”. I’d love to go on, but Adam brilliantly covered ‘Gin and Juice’ on our Cocktail of the Week series back in 2021. (He’s always one step ahead…)

The cans are nonetheless fun, and assuming you have any interest at all in seltzery-things come in colour-coded Apricot, Citrus, Melon and Passionfruit variants. The can with a purple low rider on it for example is Passionfruit, which is also flavoured with pineapple and ginger. They’re 5.9% abv. What more do you want to know? I just wanted to write about a song from Doggystyle on the MoM blog for a bit really.

8. Beluga is having a totally normal one

“A cocktail is the ultimate form of affordable luxury; for less than the price of a Pret sandwich, you can upgrade your cocktail to something far elevated beyond what you would otherwise have chosen. And in a world of drinking less, but better, who doesn’t want that?”

This was the explanation that hooked me into this masterclass. It reminded me of a campaign Maverick Drinks ran a decade or so back when craft was a relatively fresh buzzword in spirits. They wanted to demonstrate to bartenders how if they could trade customers up to a slightly more expensive cocktail made with far more exciting base spirits then they could drive greater cash margins even with a lower percentage margin on each drink. It was practical stuff.

Instead, what I walked into was a talk on how all the kids are doing caviar bumps. Apparently. That’s the upsell par excellence and the meaning of luxury. You too can lick fish roe off of the back of your own hand in an utterly confused ritual that somehow combines 1980s yuppie decadence and an actual licking action only really used elsewhere for salt when enduring a cheap mixto Tequila slammer. That is if you pay the requisite extra on top of your £25 Beluga Vodka cocktail at The Dorchester or something. I’m not actually 100% sure about that last bit because I was quietly getting up and leaving at the time.

(In her defence, Lucia Montanelli bar manager of The Vesper Bar at The Dorchester did offer some practical advice around creativity, relevance and even being really quite thrifty with luxurious presentations during her part, before things got ‘bumpy’.)

9. Gen Z do drink

Drinks Retailing editor Lucy Britner’s ‘What’s hot and what’s not in the UK off-trade’ panel took place on the first day of Imbibe Live, so we actually missed it. Master of Malt spirits buyer Lisa Halstead was one of the speakers, however, as was the CEO of YesMore drinks marketing agency Tom Khan-Lavin who wanted to quash the theory that Gen Z or ‘zoomers’ (those born during the late 1990s and early 2000s) don’t drink.

Lizzy O’Riordan, an actual bonafide Gen Zer, followed this up in a Drinks Retailing article that’s well worth a read: Gen Z aren’t anti-alcohol, but we don’t worship it either. The party certainly isn’t over, but practices such as ‘zebra striping’ (alternating between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks) have become more popular, and not just among Gen Z.

10. People are still afraid of using whisky in cocktails

Okay, so the masterclass was actually called ‘Who’s afraid of little old Scotch?, which I’m told is a Taylor Swift reference. If only Kristy was still here, she’d have loved it.

Number 2 on this list – if you can remember that far back – was that ‘Whisky has gone missing’. It could just as easily have been ‘Where’s the Scotch?’, which was the title of one of Becky’s slides as she introduced the four most common reasons bartenders don’t use Scotch in cocktails:

Don’t understand how to use it
Guests think you shouldn’t mix Scotch
Not trendy/seen as an old man’s drink
It’s too expensive

How she and others confront these issues is something I may write about further if I can find the time (I have many hats to wear around these parts!), but the interesting thing here was that the issues seemed to resonate with the audience. They are evidently myths that still need busting. For us in whisky that may seem partly surprising. ‘Enjoy your whisky how you like’, and ‘of course you can mix whisky’ seem like things that have been said so many times, for so long, that it feels repetitive or taken as read. Yet it seems many well-intentioned and even whisky-curious folk are indeed still afraid of little old Scotch.

 

* Trade shows in any industry are frankly tricky things – can they successfully be all things to all people? As Olivier Ward (Gin Foundry co-founder, spirits consultant and head judge for Gin IWSC) commented on LinkedIn, “Is it about sampling? Brand building/awareness to the on-trade? Connecting brands to buyers and decision-makers? Finding an importer/distributor? Or getting suppliers in the same space as producers and selling services? …BCB might bring the volume of brands back and some of the audience. But that’ll dwindle very fast unless they also optimise… desired outcomes for both exhibitors and attendees.” ****

** From Nc’nean to Hautes Glaces, and even a 50-year-old Banff. A single glassware supplier had as many whiskies on show as the rest of the show combined!

*** which Francesco emphasises isn’t a ‘rice wine’, sake is more like a beer if anything as it’s brewed

**** For any brands that are looking for a route into both on and off-trade, getting listed with MoM also gets you listed with MoM Trade of course…

The post 10 Things we learned at Imbibe Live 2024 appeared first on Master of Malt Blog.