Pick up any bottle of alcohol in the UK and you’ll notice something odd: there’s no ingredients list at all. Unlike food, alcoholic drinks aren’t required by UK law to disclose what’s actually in them. A liqueur has to legally tell you the name, ABV, the volume in the bottle, who the producer is, units per volume, allergen info, and not much else.
We think that’s wrong, and it’s why every Mouse Kingdom label lists exactly what’s inside the bottle.
What “radical honesty” actually means
It’s a phrase we infuse into every bottle, and it’s worth being specific about what it involves in our distillery.
Each of our liqueurs carries a full ingredient list on the label including the fruit, the base spirit, where the sugar comes from, any spice or botanical additions, and how it’s been diluted to final strength – always with Mancunian dilution.
Mancunian dilution is filtered Manchester tap water. We are proud to include this as an ingredient, because balance and dilution are incredibly important in how flavour plays out in the glass.
Nothing hidden behind “natural flavourings” or a proprietary percentage which makes no sense in real liquid. See Passoa for example…
Take our Dark Berries Liqueur as an example: Raspberry juice, Blackcurrant juice, UK wheat vodka, British sugar, dilution. That’s the whole list. No mystery, no marketing language standing in for a straight answer.
Why the law doesn’t require it, and why that’s a problem
Food producers in the UK have to declare allergens and full ingredient lists by law. Alcohol is exempt from most of that requirement — a legacy of how alcohol regulation developed separately in the 1970s from food labelling, and one that hasn’t caught up with how people actually drink in the 2020s. The result is that you can walk into a corner shop, buy a bottle, and have no idea what’s actually in your glass.
For most producers that’s convenient, because it lets less interesting ingredients like cheap flavouring & artificial colourings stay invisible.
We believe you have a right to know what you’re drinking.
What this means for how we make liqueurs
Listing every ingredient isn’t just a labelling choice. It changes how we make the product in the first place.
If something’s going on the label, we have to be able to stand behind it. That’s why our recipes lean on real fruit, considered sourcing, and balanced acidity rather than excessive sugar.
Transparency and quality are the same thing : it’s harder to hide a shortcut when you’re committing to print exactly what went into the bottle.
It also means allergen information is genuinely useful rather than a generic disclaimer. If you need to know whether a liqueur contains a particular ingredient, the answer is on the bottle.
The bigger picture
We don’t think ingredient transparency should be a point of difference — we think it should be standard practice across the industry, the same way it already is for food.
Until UK law catches up, we’ll continue to be honest about what’s in the bottle rather than rely on a legal loophole that happens to work in our favour.
Each liqueur we distil carries its full ingredient list on the label. If you’d like to check any of them before you buy, you’ll find them on every product page too.
Shop the range at mousekingdomliqueurs.co.uk.
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