AIR4110 - Alcoholic Ingredients Relief: Technical guidance: How do I assess the eligibility of finished products?

Eligibility is based on the proportion of alcohol remaining in the finished product. This is fairly simple in cases where the final product is a liquid.

Difficulties arise when the final product is a solid or semi-solid article such as liqueur chocolates. In such cases the proportion of alcohol must be compared against the net weight of the product, ie the weight excluding any:

• packaging;
• inedible accessories supplied (fork, spoon, dish, etc. But not inedible parts of the article itself, eg the bones in a chicken); and
• products not normally associated with the eligible article.

Products consisting of separate parts, not all of which contain alcoholic ingredients, eg a convenience food item consisting of a wine-based sauce with a separately packaged portion of rice, may be taken together when assessing eligibility provided that the claimant supplies them as one product.

Where a claimant produces a product by cooking with alcoholic ingredients, much of the alcohol will boil off in the cooking process. In most cases you can safely assume that cooking has reduced the alcohol to negligible levels. However, in cases where the proportion of alcohol in the recipe exceeds the eligibility criteria and there is doubt as to whether the cooking process has reduced it to within the limit, it is the claimant’s responsibility to have the products analysed in support of the claim.