Just the tonic

Lucy Warhurst (2006)

With the low- and no-alcohol trend sweeping the drinks’ market, we talk to Lucy Warhurst (2006), founder of Percival & Co, an independent drinks’ brand creating premium, lightly alcoholic drinks – low in sugar, gently sparkling and utterly reinvigorating.

I started working on Percival and Co., a new independent drinks brand, whilst bored and disillusioned by my career in finance. During this time, I became very aware of a gap in the market for high quality drinks with lower alcohol content.

After long days in the office I would be gasping for something refreshing and reinvigorating, but without the high alcohol, calorie and sugar content of the usual offerings. It seemed crazy to me that my healthconscious friends and colleagues would spend huge amounts of money on gym membership and organic food, obsess over calorie counting and completing 10,000 steps a day, and then destroy all their virtuous doings in the pub without any consideration as to the units of alcohol and hidden calories they were consuming. The phenomenon of ‘healthy living’ has dominated almost all other food and beverage markets with natural, low calorie and low sugar

products becoming extremely popular. Why had this barely entered the alcoholic drinks industry?

I set out to work on creating a drink that would tick all of these boxes.

Growing up on a farm, where we had religiously made elderflower cordial every summer, the hedgerows seemed like the right place to start. My drinks have come a long way since I started making them all in my kitchen to sell at music festivals and other events. Although delicious, I often felt like I was playing a starring role in The Hurt Locker, with bottles blowing up at random due to a problematic fermentation process, and others having to be detonated in my kitchen to avoid explosion at a later date.

However, the recipes are now perfected, and the result is our range of botanically infused Hard Tonics. These have an ABV of 4%, are low in calories and sugar, gluten-free, vegan friendly and made from 100% natural ingredients for sophisticated and distinctively British drinks without compromise. We launched in July 2018 and have since secured listings at Selfridges, Daylesford, Ocado, 31 Dover, Soho House and more. R

www.percivalandco.com/shop lucy@percivalandco.com

Below: Lucy Warhurst