New Oat Liquor Makes Creamy Dairy-Free Cocktails a Reality

For creamy cocktail fans, cutting out dairy typically means leaving behind classic cocktails like a Mudslide, Irish Coffee, or White Russian. The Finnish gin company Arctic Blue Beverages aims to change this with its new creamy vegan liqueur derived from oats. The liqueur will be the world’s first oat-based gin liqueur, providing a dairy-free alternative to popular mixers while ensuring the company’s product reduces its carbon footprint.

So far, oat has been mainly used in dairy alternatives,” Arctic Blue Beverages CEO Valtteri Eroma said. “We have noted that oat also works as an excellent base for an alcohol product.”

The company plans to initially launch the liqueur in Finland, it intends to gradually expand distribution across the world throughout 2021. The liqueur will become available as a dairy-free substitute for a number of cocktails.

The liqueur is made from organic and gluten-free Finnish oats, and its production presents a smaller carbon footprint to its dairy-based competitors. The global plant-based dairy market nearly doubled in the last five years, seeing a skyrocketing increase from $12 billion to $24 billion. Tuomas Kukkonen, the former CEO of the oat manufacturer of Kaslink Oy, recognized the market gap and decided to develop the Arctic Blue Oat. The plant-based liqueur will meet the growing desire for experimental, dairy-free cocktails available for plant-based consumers.

The Finnish market has seen a full-scale shift towards plant-based alternatives. Recently, Business Final invested €2.1 million to ignite a globally active plant-based food market in the country. Multiple companies outside of Arctic Blue Beverages are now developing plant-based products. The Finland-based Verso Foods received a patent to create a fava bean-based meat alternative last year and another food tech startup Solar Foods got the commercial green light to develop “protein from thin air.” With the Finnish plant-based market exploding, it signals a global market shift towards plant-based alternatives.

Another famous creamy alcoholic mixer is Baileys. Starting in May 2016 the company began to experiment with dairy-free versions of its product line. The first dairy-free alternative that the company launched was Almande Almondmilk Liqueur. The original recipe contained beeswax, so it took until January of 2017 for the company to earn vegan certification. The Baileys dairy-free alternative can be purchase across a number of countries globally including the US and the UK.

The Finnish oat-gin liqueur marks the first oat-based alcoholic product on the market and signifies that plant-based products are beginning to operate in every sector of the food industry. At this rate, it will become easier and easier to order a plant-based White Russian at any bar you visit.