Dr. ZeroZero AmarNo: Into It

A third alcohol-free amaro makes it a trend!

As the very talented cocktail consultant and author Shannon Mustipher pointed out last year, “[f]or the better part of 15 years, amaro has been trending among American bartenders.” Mustipher and others noted how this lead to a proliferation of American-made amari. And then came the rest of us: “[T]he continued fervor for esoteric flavors, particularly in the bitter realm, has expanded the category exponentially over the last decade,” wrote Penelope Bass for Imbibe last December.

Inevitably, the trend would hit the alcohol-free category—Better Rhodes’ Chris Becker categorized it to me on the phone the other day as between its second and third generations right now, which could be right; perhaps only just starting to mature here and there, in my opinion, but certainly developed—though I will note that this one seemed to happen particularly fast.

(I’m sorry for that em dash and semicolon situation. I know it’s a little confusing when you’re reading it, but I needed to pack a lot in quickly. Sorreeeee.)

The Pathfinder Hemp & Root launched in November 2021 and has been a “runaway success,” according to Sean Goldsmith at The Zero Proof. (The producers don’t exactly bill it as an amaro, I don’t think, but that’s how it lands for me.) Then, in December 2022, Brooklyn-based amaro producer St. Agrestis launched its second alcohol-free product, Amaro Falso, and Alessandro (Sandro) Cozzi launched what he calls AmarNo under his alcohol-free label Dr. ZeroZero. It's clear they all saw the opportunity at the intersection of alcohol-free and amaro, the latter of which is a category of drinks with a rich history that's traditionally associated with wellness and is also enjoying the aforementioned newfound interest. Boom boom boom.

I like them all for different reasons—but I love the AmarNo. It gives you the experience you would expect from the style of amaro Cozzi was going for: It’s properly bitter, and you can sip it slowly over a rock. (Most of you who read this newsletter likely already know this, but very few alcohol-free spirits can be drunk this way.) I had called him up.

I learned that Cozzi, who works as en executive assistant at Citigroup, also spent some time bottling for Faccia Brutto and has been a part of the tasting group for this Fifty Best organization. (Note that AmarNo got a nod.) Find a snippet of our conversation from earlier this week below.

So how did this product come to be?

My line of thinking was, well, “My wife's pregnant. We're amari drinkers. There's nothing really out there that satisfies what we're looking for.” Pathfinder is the only one I would put on the same flavor profile, really, even though they're going for a little bit more of a sweeter, more herbal thing than we are with our bitterness.

I have made amari before at home, but this was significantly more difficult. I was just racking my brain about how to extract flavors without using alcohol.

Yes, without it, you realize what a good job alcohol does of that!

It's very good at it! Some flavors were sugar soluble, but I was trying to make these extracts and...I hit a wall. That's when I got my father involved. He lives in Spain and he also has a house in Italy. We were like, “Well, if we can't do this ourselves, let's try and find a partner who is in the spirit-making business.”

You told me earlier that the partner is Liquorificio Italia, based in Trieste.

Yes, and their initial samples were extremely bitter—even for me, and bitter is really a happy word for me. But when we first tasted them, I was like, “I could possibly drink this, but I don't think this is mass market.”

We went back and forth for a couple of months, tasting from little tiny Mason jars being shipped from Italy to Spain, Spain to America, et cetera, and then we had our product. We didn't do any focus groups or anything like that; it was just tastings with friends and family. We hired an artist, got to work on the packaging, and it all fell together a lot more quickly than I anticipated. We've only been working on this for about 18 months.

You have an Italian name. Is your father Italian?

Well, we are both Italian citizens. He grew up all over the place—he was raised in Italy and then Germany and Japan and Spain, then he moved here in the 80s and met my mother—but he identifies as an Italian. I grew up here in Brooklyn, so I like to say the product was born in Italy and now it's going to be raised in Brooklyn.

Back to Liquorificio Italia's first iteration: Were they frustrated with the need to go less bitter? "Silly Americans" and all that?

One hundred percent. My wife and I were talking about it today. It had about five iterations before it got to where we did a big tasting. She has very large family, and we did a big tasting with them. So, the three iterations got AmarNo to us; five iterations got it to them. For people who don't drink bitter products, they’re just like, “Whoa!”

Now we're starting to dabble around with some other recipes. I'm not going to say exactly what, but there could be a more bitter product in our future.

Will those products also be alcohol-free?

Yes, they'll be under the Dr. ZeroZero brand. What we're dabbling with right now are definitely traditional Italian products. We're still in R&D, but the general large Italian spirit categories…you can do the math down the line.

What else should we know about AmarNo?

One of the things I'm very proud of is that the sugar content is fairly low, especially for an amaro product, which you wouldn't expect because you need that sugar there for balance. And you're only getting 37 calories in a 1.5-ounce serving. Because it's an after-dinner drink, most people assume it's going to be sweet and it's going to tack on some calories. But if you pour two ounces of this on a rock and sip on that, you're just drinking 50 or 60 calories.

Since the last newsletter, I was quoted in:

• SevenFiftyDaily

• Liquor.com

And Vice gave Good Drinks a lovely review (two years after publication; I dig it).

Cheers!