A low-cal Cosmopolitan? Drinks maker launches 'healthier' cocktails
Not so sweet taste of success: Danielle Wilson has started a firm selling low sugar cocktails. - Credit: Denise Bradley
It's probably the sweetest news ever for cocktail lovers - a new Norfolk firm is selling tipples with all the taste but not the calories.
Cocktails and dreams: Danielle Wilson shows off her new range of low sugar drinks. - Credit: Denise Bradley
Danielle Wilson has set up her own new brand of cocktails which don't include the high amounts of sugar that many of the sweet-tasting drinks are renowned for.
She's launched Mindful Mixology which offers bottled cocktails made to her own recipes such as lychee martinis, salted coconut espresso martinis and grapefruit margaritas.
The box of three cocktails which contain less sugar. - Credit: Denise Bradley
Ms Wilson, 35, who lives in Aylsham, hit upon the idea of a new brand of healthier alcoholic cocktails after running, pre Covid, a big bar in London.
However, she started feeling ill and tests showed she needed to cut down on refined sugar. She knew from making cocktails just how much sugar they contain. One serving of espresso martini can contain six teaspoons, about 100 calories in sugar alone.
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She then decided in lockdown to start her own online business making cocktails with low sugar content but finding ways of making them taste just as good. So, for example, she uses organic coconut blossom sugar in her espresso martini rather than the normal added sugar syrup.
An average lychee martini contains around 30g of sugar and more than 300 calories whereas hers has half the amount of sugar because she's omitted lychee syrup, using a very low sugar small batch vermouth, vodka and lychee liqueur. And Ms Wilson's special edition 'gingerbread old fashioned' is completely sugar-free.
The range of three cocktails in a box at Mindful Mixology. - Credit: Denise Bradley
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Ms Wilson mixes up the cocktails, for sale for £9 each, herself in a commercial kitchen in Salle, near Reepham, bottles and packs them. At Christmas she posted out on average 40 boxes of three cocktails a week and as a result has started to break even.
"When I was working in London, you'd get people trying to be healthy and not having a chocolate bar but then having four pornstar martinis and yet a a lot of cocktails contain more sugar than a can of Coke."
She wants to go on to offer a subscription service for her cocktails and team up with other sustainable brands.
Ms Wilson is back to full fitness now after being careful with her sugar intake and reckons she has the best job in the world.
"I make the cocktails in batches but I have to be careful not to test them all day, you'd definitely get drunk. I try just a tiny bit to get the taste right."
