A field guide

    What is a botanical product?

    A short guide to whole plants, extracts, processing and place — and how Ebbor approaches each.

    A definition

    A product made from plants, not from flavourings.

    A botanical product 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

    Where the plant ends and the extract begins.

    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

    What is lost between the field and the glass.

    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 products 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 fills each edition into a glass bottle.

    Place

    The same plant is not the same everywhere.

    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 product that names its places is telling you something real about what is in it.

    How Ebbor works

    More than a botanical product.

    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.

    25 ml · 0.0% alcohol.

    Questions

    Is a botanical product alcoholic?
    Not necessarily. The term describes where the flavour comes from, not the alcohol content. Every Ebbor edition is 0.0% alcohol.
    What is the difference between whole-plant and extract-based products?
    An extract isolates a part of a plant. A whole-plant product keeps more of the raw material, and its natural structure, together.
    Can I choose the plants in my own botanical product?
    Not at present. Each Ebbor edition is composed by us from a finite harvest; the Plants library shows what each raw material typically contains.