“Something different, not less”: Collider’s Harry Cooke on brewing the beer he wanted to drink

Founder Interviews · October 2026 · interview by Rich

Collider is a London alcohol-free beer brand that Harry Cooke set up in 2022, after years in the wine trade, where he co-founded the prosecco brand Pale Fox. Its first beers went on sale at the start of 2024, sold only through its own website; that year it raised a reported £720k round led by DMG Ventures, and since September 2026 Morrisons has stocked its Lager and Session IPA. Collider doesn’t own a brewery: a UK brewer it has agreed not to name makes its beer to its recipes. We put our questions to Harry: the jump from prosecco, the name, that brewing partnership, brewing to low strength rather than taking the alcohol out, the Peach Lager, raising money, the Morrisons listing, and the summer Collider ran out of beer.

New to Collider? Our pages on its Lager, Session IPA and Peach Lager have what’s in each can and where to buy it, and our Collider brewery page has the company’s story.

You spent years in wine, co-founding the prosecco brand Pale Fox, before setting up Collider. What took you from prosecco to alcohol-free beer, and was there a moment that tipped you into doing it?

I actually started out in spirits, then co-founded Pale Fox. The drinks trade is great fun, but there’s a real pressure to be out midweek with customers, and nobody’s stopping at one glass. As I got older I started to feel it. I’d get to Thursday and just not be on my A game, and I didn’t think I could run a business properly like that.

So I cut right back. I was drinking a lot of alcohol-free beer, and separately I was already taking lion’s mane for work. The tipping point was a night in the pub, about five pints of alcohol-free lager in, thinking: what am I actually doing here? It wasn’t doing anything. I was just going through the motions.

At the same time I was seeing adaptogens pop up in canned soft drinks, but nobody had put them in beer. Which is odd when you think about it, because beer already owns the after-work pint, the pub and the dinner table. So Collider was a pretty selfish idea. I made the thing I wanted to drink and hoped other people would want it too. And honestly, I was never really the target customer for prosecco. With Collider, I’m very much the buyer.

Where does the name Collider come from, and what did you want the brand to stand for when the first beers went on sale?

It’s named after the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator that smashes things together to discover something new. That’s roughly what we’re doing: smashing proper beer and functional ingredients together to make something that didn’t exist before. The little four-pointed spark inside the O on the can is that moment of collision. It’s a slightly nerdy name for a beer brand. I’m fine with that.

What I wanted it to stand for was simple: something different, not less. Every alcohol-free beer on the shelf was defined by what it had taken away. No alcohol, fewer calories, no hangover. All subtraction. We wanted to take the alcohol out and put something back in, so you keep the ritual of cracking a cold one at the end of the day and get something that actually helps you unwind.

When the first cans went on sale at the start of 2024, I genuinely didn’t know if anyone else would want it. We sold six months of stock in four weeks, which answered the question fairly quickly.

“Wine gives you one harvest a year to get it right. Beer gives you a fresh chance to get it wrong every few weeks.”

Harry Cooke, founder of Collider

Is there anything from the wine trade, whether tasting, blending or selling, that you’ve carried over into how you make and sell Collider?

Honestly, the first thing wine taught me was the wrong lesson. I assumed you find a good brewer, hand over the recipe, and they make great beer every time. That is not how it works. Getting it consistently right has been far more iterative than I expected. Wine gives you one harvest a year to get it right. Beer gives you a fresh chance to get it wrong every few weeks.

What did carry over is the selling side. With prosecco you learn quickly that people are buying an occasion and a feeling as much as what’s in the glass. That’s shaped everything about how Collider looks and talks. The blending side has come in handy too, just in a different way. Getting our botanicals in at a level that’s worth having, without the beer ever tasting of anything but beer, is its own little blending exercise.

You don’t own a brewery: Collider is brewed to your recipes by a UK brewer you’ve agreed not to name. How does that partnership work day to day, and how much of what’s in the can is down to you?

We don’t own a brewery, and I don’t want to. Steel tanks are a brilliant way to tie up money that should be going into getting beer into people’s hands, and plenty of great beers are made exactly this way.

Day to day it’s a proper collaboration. We own the recipes and the spec: the malt, the hops, the ABV we have to land under, and the functional blend, which we source and supply ourselves. The brewer brings the kit, the team and years of know-how.

So what goes into the can is ours. Making it well, batch after batch, is a joint effort. And we’re fussy: every batch is tested before it leaves the brewery.

Rather than brewing a full-strength beer and taking the alcohol out, you use special yeasts, less malt and temperature control so fermentation finishes early. Why that route, and what does it mean for how the beer tastes?

Taking the alcohol out of a full-strength beer works, but it’s a bit like baking a cake and then trying to get the sugar back out. You strip flavour, you lose body, and you can end up with something thin with a slightly metallic finish.

So we brew it so it never gets there in the first place. Yeasts that don’t eat all the sugars, a lighter malt bill, and tight temperature control so we can stop fermentation at the right moment and keep it under 0.5%.

The catch with this route is sweetness. Stop fermenting early and you’re left with sugar the yeast never got to, which is why a lot of alcohol-free beer tastes a bit worty. A lot of our recipe work has gone into getting a drier, crisper finish so it drinks like a proper beer, not malt juice. It also means we’re not leaning on added flavourings to paper over the gaps, which some of the bigger brands do. What you taste is the beer.

More on the different routes in our guide to how alcohol-free beer is made.

Peach Lager is your newest beer, made with real peach juice. How does a new Collider beer come together, and why peach?

Peach was a bit of an accident. It started as a limited edition, and the reaction was unlike anything we’d done before. People weren’t just buying it again, they were telling their friends about it. So in March it became a permanent part of the range.

Why peach? It’s for people who don’t love beer but want something more grown-up than a soft drink. Our Lager and IPA drinkers are about 80% men. Peach is roughly 50/50. And when Young’s took us on in their pubs, it was the Peach they chose.

As for how a new beer comes together, it usually starts with a gap we can see in what our customers are asking for. We work through trial brews until it’s right, and then we put it in front of our own customers first. Selling direct means we find out very quickly whether something works.

In 2024 you raised money in a round led by DMG Ventures, the investment arm of the Daily Mail’s parent company. What did backers from outside the drinks industry bring, and what’s it like raising money for an alcohol-free brand right now?

DMG were a brilliant first lead, and the fact they’re a media business rather than a drinks business is exactly why it worked. A drinks investor will tell you how the industry has always done things. DMG understand audiences, attention and how a brand gets talked about, which is where we’ve put most of our energy. They’ve also been really generous with introductions.

Raising for alcohol-free right now is harder than the headlines suggest. The category has grown up, and the bar has gone up with it. A nice can and a good story used to get you a meeting. Now investors want to see people coming back to buy again, and how fast you sell off a supermarket shelf. Which is fair enough. It’s the right test.

Since September, Morrisons has stocked your Lager and Session IPA. What does it take for a young alcohol-free brand to get onto supermarket shelves, and what’s changed since?

Proof, mostly. We’d spent nearly two years selling direct, so when we sat down with buyers we could show real numbers: who buys it, how often they come back, and what they think of it. That counts for a lot more than a deck. A buyer is taking a risk on every inch of shelf, and they want to know you’ll bring your own customers with you.

Then patience. The listing was agreed in May and we went live in September. Nothing in grocery happens quickly.

What’s changed is that I’ve learned the listing is the start, not the finish line. The real work is making sure you’re on the shelf, in the right spot, in every store, every week, and then giving people a reason to pick you up. It’s also changed who finds us. Online, you have to come looking. In Morrisons, people who’ve never heard of functional beer just come across us in the beer aisle, which is exactly what this category needs.

What’s been the hardest moment so far, the point where you weren’t sure it was going to work?

Probably this summer, which is a strange thing to say because it was also our best summer. July was our biggest month ever, and then we ran out of beer. At one point we had around 1,000 orders waiting to go out, with the Morrisons launch a few weeks away.

Selling out sounds like a nice problem until you’re the one answering the emails. People who’ve chosen us over a pint deserve better than a late box. We got through it, and we now plan stock a lot further ahead.

But there’s a moment in every one of these, usually late at night with a spreadsheet open, where you wonder if you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. The answer is usually yes. You chew anyway.

Most of our readers come for alcohol-free beer. If someone’s never tried Collider, which can should they start with, and when do you open one yourself?

If you like beer, start with the Session IPA. It won Best in Class at the London Beer Competition with 96 points, and it’s the one I’d hand anyone who says alcohol-free beer is boring. If you’re more of a lager person, the Lager is clean and crisp and does exactly what it says. If you don’t really like beer, or you’re buying for someone who doesn’t, go straight for the Peach. Or get the mixed pack and settle the argument yourself.

Me? I don’t drink alcohol during the week any more, so Collider is my weeknight beer. Usually around seven, when the laptop shuts and I want something that marks the end of the working day. And it’s the first thing I reach for on a Sunday after a big Saturday.

Harry sent us his answers to our questions in October 2026.

Try Collider for yourself

Our pages on the three beers have what’s in each can, the calories and where to buy them:

Collider sells all three in packs of 12, 24 and 48 on its own website, and Morrisons has the Lager and Session IPA in four-packs; see our Morrisons alcohol-free beer guide. Collider’s first-order code is on our alcohol-free beer discount codes page. Links to Collider’s own shop and to Morrisons aren’t affiliate links.

Every Collider beer contains a blend of L-theanine, lion’s mane and ashwagandha, which Collider calls its Unwind Blend. As on our beer pages, we review Collider as a beer. The Session IPA’s Best in Class is Collider’s own claim: it credits the London Beer Competition on its blog and the London Beer Awards on its homepage, and we couldn’t check the organiser’s results.

Here for the beer? Find the alcohol-free version of your usual pint with our Swap Finder, compare calories in our calorie calculator, or browse every beer we’ve reviewed. For more of this series, read UNLTD.’s Johnny Johnson on brewing the alcohol out and the pint can, You + I’s Alan Moore on raw kombucha from a Glasgow railway arch, or see all our founder interviews. And if you’re a founder in the alcohol-free space who’d like to be part of this series, get in touch.