A field guide
A short guide to whole plants, extracts, processing and place — and how Ebbor approaches each.
A definition
A botanical drink takes its flavour, aroma and colour from plants: fruit, leaf, flower, root, bark and seed.
The term covers a wide range. Some are distillates, some are infusions, some are built from extracts and added flavourings. What they share is a starting point in the plant world.
Whole plant and extract
An extract isolates part of a plant: a single aroma, a concentrated colour, one named compound. It is precise and consistent, and it leaves most of the plant behind.
A whole-plant approach keeps more of the raw material together: the fibres, pigments, acids, sugars, oils and the many minor compounds that rarely appear on a label. Scientists call this the food matrix — the structure in which a plant's components naturally sit.
Flavour lives in that matrix. So does much of what makes one harvest taste different from the next.
Processing
Every step after harvest changes a plant. Heat, light, oxygen, time and filtration all alter its natural composition, and some of those changes cannot be reversed.
Many drinks put back what processing took away, adding vitamins or flavourings to a base that has been stripped. We would rather lose less to begin with.
That is why Ebbor moves from harvest to production quickly, works in small batches, and packs each edition in a pouch that keeps out light and oxygen.
Place
A plant's composition is shaped by where it grew: the light, soil, water, temperature and season of a particular landscape.
An Arctic berry and a Mediterranean berry of the same family can taste and measure quite differently. A botanical drink that names its places is telling you something real about what is in it.
How Ebbor works
Ebbor is a non-alcoholic botanical edition made in Somerset from whole plants chosen for their flavour and natural composition.
Each edition names its plants and the landscapes they came from. Each finished edition is independently analysed, and that record travels with it in the Plant Passport.
500ml · 20 serves · 0.0% alcohol.
Questions