22.1.2025

Two Bottles Muri

This week we have two non-alcoholic sparkling drinks from Muri: Yamilé with raspberry and smoked rhubarb, and Passing Clouds with floral notes and white currant.

On a wooden table, there are two bottles of non-alcoholic sparkling drinks from Muri. One is Yamilé and the other is Passing Clouds. In the background, a wine glass and a stack of books are visible.

Muri had been on my list of things I wanted to try for a long time. I can’t remember when I first saw the bottles somewhere, but the combinations of ingredients sounded exciting and somehow extraordinary every time I came across them. At the same time, they were probably the first bottles of alcohol-free alternatives where I thought the price was quite ambitious. Muri springs from the fine dining scene in Copenhagen, Denmark. The very Copenhagen that long housed the spearhead of New Nordic Cuisine with Noma. Not that I’ve ever been there. But the influence of product cuisine, fermenting, locality, and also the frequent focus on more or less wild natural wines has left its mark worldwide. And it’s from exactly this gastro corner and the need for exciting drinks for a food pairing without alcohol that Muri springs, founded by Murray Paterson in 2020. The drinks are all based on fermented components, herbs, and fruits, sourced as locally as possible in cooperation with Danish farmers.

From the range, we’re trying a bottle of Passing Clouds and a bottle of Yamilé today. These two bottles are also not completely without alcohol at 0.4% alcohol by volume each. But it’s so close that the drinks are allowed to be advertised as alcohol-free, and fruit juice often contains a little bit of alcohol too, as fermentation in the fruits doesn’t completely wait for processing. Fact is, where there’s fermentation, there’s alcohol. Sourdough and sauerkraut are no exception here. Those who really want a bottle completely without need to make sure that 0.0% is written on the bottle, and those who really want completely without probably already know that anyway. Passing Clouds is based on fermented gooseberries, white currant wine, quince kefir, jasmine tea, geranium, and woodruff kvass. Yamilé is based on raspberries from a carbonic maceration, gooseberry mead, smoked rhubarb, goldenrod, and pepper kefir. Many ingredients, then. If the name Yamilé sounds familiar, you might be right. Yamile Abad, who was the cellar master at Staffelter Hof and whose SCOBY, which was even allowed to serve as the background of a blog post once, still lives here in the kitchen, gave Muri the idea of carbonic maceration. And was then allowed to serve as the namesake for the drink.

We start with the Yamilé. It smells of a lot of raspberry, somewhere between fully ripe and candy. Then comes honey and the more you put your nose in the glass, the more it smells like cold medicine syrup. The smoke is far in the background and I’m sometimes not so sure if I really smell it or just think I smell it because I know it should be there. It then also tastes like cold medicine syrup and as so often with such descriptions, it doesn’t sound particularly nice, but it’s very tasty. Honey and herbal syrup lay on the tongue and it feels soft and intense at the same time. If I had to complain, it would be that there could be more pull. Although the 55 grams of residual sugar per liter is pleasantly dry for an alcohol-free sparkling drink, I somehow miss a bit of zing. But it has depth, and that’s often missing without alcohol. That’s where all the fermenting pays off. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to get depth into the bottle like this. You can simply taste that behind the fruit and the acidity and the aromas there’s still something coming, just a bit of umami and complexity. I like that.

Passing Clouds intensely reminds of quince. There’s something yellow in the nose, there are herbs, probably the woodruff, and the more you drink, the more tart it becomes. The quince, which completely dominated the first moments, slowly moves into the background. And here too, there’s a depth on the back of the tongue that you only get through fermenting. There’s honey and indeed a floral note. I feel the white currant more in the acidity than I actually taste or smell it. At least I suspect it comes from the currant, because in the last sparkling drinks containing currant there was always real razzmatazz on the tongue. It feels even drier than Yamilé, certainly also because of the extra acidity, because I probably wouldn’t be able to taste out the 10 grams less actual residual sugar. I like this one very much too and it reminds me a little bit of the Riesling, Jasmine, Verbena Juicy Tea from Van Nahmen. Just with more depth and complexity.

Nevertheless, this brings me to the elephant in the room. I don’t think I’ll buy more. No question, this is really good. There’s certainly a lot of work in it, many ingredients, a lot of bubbling stuff. And the result is impressively good in both cases. No alcohol-free sparkling drink I had has had so much depth before. But I think to really turn it up, maybe it needs the environment it comes from. The starred tasting menu, the table service, the event. Here at home, simply on the sofa, it doesn’t do enough extra for me personally compared to a bottle of Juicy Tea. Something that is my own fault entirely.

Related Posts

comments powered by Disqus