This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode, No Buzz Booze: The History and Science of Going Low- or No-Alcohol, first released on February 11, 2025. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

CYNTHIA GRABER: I have never, literally, never had non-alcoholic beer before.

JEREMY ROTHMAN-SHORE: I had some last night, so I’m much more up on it.

GEOFF MANAUGH: I’m Geoff Manaugh. And, yeah, this is actually the first night, to my knowledge, that I will be tasting non-alcoholic beer.

ROSECRANS BALDWIN: Hi, I’m Rosecrans Baldwin, and I don’t have much of a relationship with non-alcoholic beverages. I’ve had an athletic beer before. I just wanted to sample the landscape. And I came away really unimpressed.

GRABER: We have beer, wine, cocktails, and a booze that I think is going to be pretty bad. Sorry, booze.

NICOLA TWILLEY: All right, so we have, we have some low expectations, which is always the way I like to start things.

GRABER: You know it’s going to be a fun night when Nicky and I are both pretty sure that things are going to taste bad and we rope our friends into the whole experience.

TWILLEY: It’s the price you pay for being married to or friends with a Gastropod co-host. This is of course Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I’m Nicola Twilley.

GRABER: And I’m Cynthia Graber. And this episode was inspired by an email that came through the normal email route, to our [email protected] email, and it was from a generous supporter of the show, but I must admit he happens to also be a close friend.

ROTHMAN-SHORE: I’m Jeremy Rothman-Shore. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have been listening to Gastropod since the very first episode. I still remember about the golden spoon.

TWILLEY: Jeremy is an OG fan and I love it. But this episode, he’s all business. Because he has a question that only Gastropod can answer.

ROTHMAN-SHORE: So, over the last year I’ve developed a real taste for non-alcoholic beer. And it kind of got me wondering: how do they make it? Do they make it like regular beer and then they take the alcohol out? Or do they have some way of brewing the taste of beer without alcohol? It, it kind of baffled me. And so that’s what I wanted to know.

TWILLEY: When we heard this, we realized we had no clue how on Earth they make non-alcoholic drinks too. Which is weird, because we’ve all just spent the past month hearing about them nonstop.

BROADCASTER: Many people are choosing to skip the alcohol this month, it is part of a growing health campaign called Dry January.

GRABER: But it turns out, people aren’t seeking out non-alcoholic beer and mocktails just in January, it’s turning into a whole thing.

ANCHOR: And now to the growing movement of “sober curious” living. It’s a trend, rising in popularity among younger generations who are choosing to reduce their alcohol consumption, or just not drink at all.

REPORTER: While non-alcoholic beer, wine and cocktails make up a small fraction of the overall alcohol market, sales are rapidly rising.

TWILLEY: Just to put this in perspective, non-alcoholic booze still adds up to less than one percent of the sales of regular booze. But those sales are growing fast—this year, they’re up 67 percent since 2022.

GRABER: And this is why we scoured the local wine and spirits stores and invited over some equally adventurous friends to have a booze-free binge.

TWILLEY: But you know us: this episode is not just about how this stuff tastes—although we’ve got that in spades. We also wanted to know who invented non-alcoholic booze, how they make it, and whether it can actually help people who struggle with drinking to cut back.

GRABER: Gastropod is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the public understanding of science, technology, and economics, and by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for our coverage of biomedical research. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

TWILLEY: To understand how to get alcohol out of booze, it helps to understand how it got there in the first place.

WES PEARSON: Well, it’s a pretty natural process, really.

DANA GARVES: Yeah, we have yeast to thank for that.

GRABER: Dana Garves is the owner and senior beer chemist at Oregon Brew Lab, which does quality control for beverage companies. And Wes Pearson is a senior research scientist at the Australian Wine Research Institute.

PEARSON: Yeasts are, they’re everywhere, all over, all sorts of things. And so really you can put grapes in a bucket and come back in two weeks and there’ll be wine.

GRABER: We’ve talked about this process before on the show: Yeast eat the sugars and they turn that into ethanol, or alcohol, and carbon dioxide.

GARVES: And yeast does produce a bunch of other things too, not just alcohol and CO2.

TWILLEY: Alcohol—specifically ethanol—and fizz, AKA carbon dioxide—those are two big ones. But like Dana says, there’s a bunch of other what scientists call fermentation products.

PEARSON: So those are a lot of the aromas and flavors that we get in wine.

GARVES: I won’t be able to name all, like, 300 compounds. But a lot of the ones that we can end up tasting in the end are like acetaldehyde. Which is a green apple kind of like a Jolly Rancher green apple flavor. Another one is diacetyl, which creates kind of that movie popcorn, buttery flavor. But then we have some really excellent flavors like esters, some fruity compounds that we might want depending on the beer style.

GRABER: Those all sound delicious. But the ethanol that yeast creates isn’t just a nice thing to have that makes us feel a little buzzed, a little floaty, maybe a little giggly. It actually changes the sensory experience of the drink, too.

PEARSON: Ethanol in itself is a pretty unique compound. Like spirits, vodka, for instance, you put it in your mouth, it’s quite warming. It’s very, you know, they would call it even hot. It might burn.

GARVES: It kind of gives you a fuller mouthfeel. It gives the impression of kind of a more well rounded or heavier… feeling, texture.

TWILLEY: That fuller mouthfeel, the way ethanol makes a drink more viscous—that also contributes to that slight drying effect you get on the inside of your mouth when you drink, it’s a little astringent.

GRABER: And then it turns out that ethanol also influences how you experience the flavor notes that are in your wine or spirit or beer, too.

GARVES: There are a lot of ways that ethanol interacts with all of the different compounds in beer. It does have a tendency to hang on to sweetness and bitterness.

PEARSON: It has a pretty unique set of characteristics that are not easy to replicate.

TWILLEY: Basically, ethanol is great, and we’ve been enjoying ethanol based drinks for most of human history. But of course, you can’t drink it all the time.

GRABER: And so, unsurprisingly, there are plenty of drinks that we humans have been enjoying since time immemorial that have no alcohol. There’s always water, but then we’ve been enjoying tea and coffee and hot chocolate and fruit juice. Lots of good stuff.

TWILLEY: There’s also long been a thriving appetite for lower-alcohol versions of alcoholic drinks. Small beer was popular from the Middle Ages as something adults and kids alike could drink morning, noon and night. Ben Franklin mentions it as a breakfast drink in his autobiography. It only had 2 percent alcohol, or less, compared to normal beer which is more in the 4 and up range.

GRABER: There was a lower alcohol version of wine that’s been around for thousands of years that the ancient Romans called workers’ wine.

TWILLEY: These would have been slightly intoxicated workers, because this lower alcohol wine-relative—it’s called piquette often these days—it’s still between 5 and 9 percent alcohol. But that’s definitely lower than the 12 to 14 percent average of regular wine.

GRABER: Modern low- or no-alcohol wine got its start about 150 years ago. My favorite story about this is the story of Welch’s grape juice. The history there is that in 1869 a guy from New Jersey who was both a dentist and a prohibitionist created pasteurized unfermented Concord grape juice as a non-alcoholic quote “wine” for communion at his Methodist church. It was marketed as Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine for more than twenty years.

PEARSON: I mean, there’s been products that are, say, juice based, that have been produced for many years. They’re packaged like wine, all the labeling looks like wine, they might be sparkling. Put the sparkling cork in it with the cage on the top, looks like champagne or sparkling wine.

TWILLEY: The golden oldie here is Martinelli’s. Their sparkling non-alcoholic apple cider is the champagne of kids everywhere, and it’s been around since the 1860s, too.

PEARSON: There’s been lots of products like that over many years. That are kind of, pseudo-wines, but they’re not actually wine, they’re juice based.

GRABER: But then, in Germany, there was a wine maker named Carl Jung—no relation to the famous Swiss father of psychoanalysis. At the end of the 1800s, he lowered the alcohol in their Riesling because some of their customers wanted to try their version of dry January. And his family’s company has been making this low or no alcohol version ever since.

TWILLEY: All of these low or no alcohol alternatives really got going because of the temperance movement, which started out in the 1800s encouraging moderation in alcohol consumption. Then it picked up steam as the century wore on, and by the 1900s, the goal was to just make everyone teetotal.

GRABER: We’ve talked about Prohibition a lot on the show. There were a bunch of different prohibitions around the world, but the most important and influential one was in the U.S. between 1920 and 1933. The government prohibited the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages.

TWILLEY: The law is the law, but people obviously still drank, in secret. Still, that is when zero alcohol beers and wines took off.

GRABER: So when it comes to beer, Prohibition-era brewers copied what had been going on for centuries: making small beers. The important thing about beer is that you first have to first free up the sugar in the starchy grain. Fruit juice like grape juice is already super sugary, but to get at the sugar in grains like barley, you soak them in warm or hot water to make what’s called a mash. Then the yeast can eat the sugars in the water from the mash and do its thing.

TWILLEY: The result is beer—hurray! But for small beer, what people would do is take that first batch of booze out, and use the barley mash all over again, like reusing a tea bag for a second or even a third cup.

GARVES: The second round is going to be much more diluted, way less sugars available, and so you’re going to get a lower fermentation. So I know that a lot of breweries during Prohibition would do dilutions or second runnings to in order to get low-alcohol or no-alcohol production.

GRABER: Another process beer makers have used for centuries is making their mash at colder temperatures. To use that same tea bag analogy, it’s like brewing tea in cold water and getting a weaker brew.

GARVES: And so, you know, that’s one that’s been done for a really long time. And I think a lot of European non-alcoholic producers still use a cold ferment, or will dilute backwards with water to meet the desired ABV.

TWILLEY: All of these processes produce lower alcohol beer. But Dana told us, it doesn’t taste as good. You get a lot of off flavors, and you don’t get all the good flavors you want. The result is watery and honestly, kind of bad.

GRABER: For wine, people hijacked the process of distillation. To make a spirit, you start with a fermented mush of fruits or grains or whatever. But it’s not really strong yet. The good news is ethanol evaporates at a lower temperature than water. So you can boil the alcohol off, capture it, and let it turn into a liquid again, and then you basically have a spirit. But you could do the same process with wine: boil it, wait for the alcohol to evaporate but then toss the alcohol out, keep the rest of the wine.

TWILLEY: The major problem here is that this process involves boiling your wine. Which can affect the delicate nose on a fine pinot noir for example. It makes it taste cooked.

PEARSON: A good comparison is if, if you’ve ever made, you’ve ever made jam, right? So we’ve got fresh strawberries or raspberries. You get them on, in your saucepan and you’re adding heat and stirring them. You’re removing water from that solution. You’re concentrating it up. But you can smell that, that—we call it cooked, but it’s the, it’s probably the sugars that are in those, you know, in that fruit being concentrated, reducing down. The Maillard reaction is, causing some of those, caramelization maybe of the, of those flavors. And so we call that a cooked character.

GRABER: Jam is delicious on toast, but nobody wants their wine to taste like liquid jam. Not to sound like a snob, but those original cooked low- or no-alcohol wines sound like they were not good wine.

TWILLEY: Nonetheless, for a long time, this was the state of the art in low- or no-alcohol booze. As recently as the 1970s, a Texas oilman working in the Middle East was reduced to boiling his beer to create a zero-alcohol beer called Texas Select to comply with local Islamic prohibitions. And don’t even get me started on O’Doul’s, which was introduced in 1990 and was pretty much the only non-alcoholic beer in town when I was a kid. It tasted like you’d squeezed out a rag used for cleaning the bar.

GRABER: Yum. But Wes says the beer was good compared to the early wines.

PEARSON: Those first products that we ever saw, they were pretty… I don’t want to say shocking, but they didn’t quite resemble wine at all.

TWILLEY: Wes is trying to be diplomatic. But fortunately, we have made some progress.

GARVES: I think that over the last few decades, we’ve actually made huge strives in science to recreate non-alcoholic beverages in the image of their original form.

TWILLEY: These strides that Dana is referring to—they’re the result of some groovy new technologies.

PEARSON: So the first one, and it’s probably been around the longest, would be called reverse osmosis. And so we use that. That’s a membrane, you’re passing wine through a membrane.

GRABER: Reverse osmosis is a technology that uses pressure and a membrane to push liquid through the membrane, and then some stuff gets left behind the membrane. It’s used a lot for making seawater into fresh drinking water. But you can also use it to push out the alcohol from booze.

GARVES: But what this does is it strips the beer of a lot of flavors. So it tastes kind of watery and diluted.

PEARSON: In wine, it tends to be used more for alcohol adjustments and not complete dealcoholization.

TWILLEY: Wine has more alcohol in it than beer at the start, so there’s just more left when you’ve pushed it through the membrane. Like Wes says, this meant that reverse osmosis was mostly used to take out just a percentage or two of alcohol in wine. And it was pretty widely used in California until recently, because wines with more than 14 percent alcohol used to be taxed at a higher rate. And California grapes get so much sunshine and make so much sugar that they routinely clock in at closer to 16 percent.

GRABER: People say that as much as a quarter to half of all California wines were tweaked to get slightly lower alcohol levels before the tax rules changed in 2018. Reverse osmosis is one way to do this, but it still was an art, because it would concentrate the wine and strip out some flavors, so even removing a couple of percentage points of alcohol, it wasn’t like a straightforward process. They had to tweak the final product to make it taste like they wanted.

TWILLEY: To get even lower alcohol wine, people used something called vacuum distillation. So this is like boiling the wine, but—big but—because you’re doing it under a vacuum, the alcohol boils off at a lower temperature, so you get less of the jam effect.

GRABER: Carl Jung actually invented the first version of this for wine in the late 1800s. He read about expeditions to the Himalayas and learned that water boiled at a lower temperature at higher altitudes and higher pressure, which gave him the idea. He got a patent for it in 1907.

TWILLEY: But like we said, this stuff still didn’t taste super great. Really, heating wine at all kind of ruins it.

GRABER: But a better, new and improved vacuum distillation technology that could help make a new and improved low- or no-alcohol beer or wine would eventually be invented and transform the industry. That story, coming up, after the break.

[BREAK]

PEARSON: So, the original idea, it was developed by the CSIRO in the 1960s. So that’s Australia’s national science organization.

TWILLEY: Seatbelts on, folks: it is time to meet the spinning cone, a breakthrough in non-alcoholic booze-making that was originally invented to do something else altogether.

GRABER: In the 1960s a scientist at CSIRO developed a new vacuum distillation technology. He wanted to help companies capture delicate fruit aromas that were lost in concentrating fruit juice. In particular, he focused on the very delicious passionfruit.

TWILLEY: Normally, if you just boil fruit juice to evaporate the water and make a concentrate, a lot of the fruit flavors also evaporate off into the steam. But this new vacuum distillation contraption promised to prevent those flavors from getting lost in the process.

GRABER: It ended up not being used for passionfruit juice, but it had a lot of other practical applications.

PEARSON: It gets used in freeze dried coffee, if you’ve had iced tea, probably made with one of these machines. It’s really good at removing flavor. Allowing you to do something with the product and then to put it back in. So it’s pretty, it’s a pretty clever machine.

GRABER: The person who bought the patent also noticed that it was pretty good at taking alcohol out of wine, but it took a while before there was much of an interest in using it for that—other than, as we said, adjusting alcohol levels in California wine. But in the past decade or so, interest has picked up.

TWILLEY: So how exactly does this clever machine work? How does it get the alcohol out of booze, while maybe also saving the flavors?

PEARSON: Sure. Okay. So your wine gets put in at the top. You’ve got a, there’s a, cylinder and it’s filled with—the best way to describe it is plates. It’s plates stacked on top of one another. And every second plate spins at a, at a, at a high rotation. The wine is pushed through under vacuum and under a strong vacuum in this cone.

GRABER: Basically with all those plates spinning in a column in the cone, the wine spreads out into a super thin liquid film that’s coating those plates. Like we said, the vacuum pressure means ethanol evaporates at a lower temperature than usual, and then the thin film means the whole thing happens really quickly so it doesn’t cook as hot or for as long.

PEARSON: While this is happening, steam is being injected at the bottom of cone and is rising up through the cone. Now as that steam rises up, that is what extracts your ethanol and, you know, there’s other things that come along with that. You know, that have similar distillation points or, or… that come out with the ethanol at the same temperature. And they all come out through the top of the cone, and the wine falls to the bottom.

TWILLEY: And you’re good to go.

GRABER: Well, not necessarily. You listeners probably won’t be surprised to hear that things weren’t quite that easy. Let’s start with beer: non-alcoholic beer makers were quick to pick up this new technology.

GARVES: And that’s the main one. That’s the one that Athletic uses or you know, if they were to Uh come out and actually talk about what they do. I’m sure this is the one they do. They keep that very close to the chest.

TWILLEY: Athletic is one of the biggest and most popular non-alcoholic craft beer companies in the US. But Dana told us one of things that does get lost in this spinning cone process is the fizz.

GARVES: We had to get rid of the CO2 that the yeast produced in order to put it through this machine. And now we have to add it back in.

GRABER: That’s not the only issue. Alcohol is a preservative, it keeps your beer from going bad. So brewers have to make the beer a little more acidic.

GARVES: And so not only do we have to add CO2, which luckily does lower the pH of beer, but not enough. We do still need to add in certain acids. So you’ll see a lot of non-alcoholic beers have, like, citric acid or lactic acid as a way to lower that pH and protect it.

TWILLEY: This is a really interesting issue that all non-alcoholic booze makers face—alcohol is such a great preservative that when you take it out, you have to deal with microbe issues you never even had to think about before. Drink?

GRABER: Yes please! But the way they tweak the beer to adjust it, to make it more acidic, well, you shouldn’t notice it when you sip it.

GARVES: Because non-alcoholic beer is so—we’ll say alkaline, or more alkaline, more basic. If it’s done right, it will never taste sour. It’s just going to give you a little extra mouthfeel.

TWILLEY: Which is good because, like we said, ethanol has a lot of mouthfeel and you’ve just lost all of that.

GRABER: Another way the beer gets tweaked has to do with hops. We’ve talked about this in the past, hops are a plant, and adding hops to beer both adds a bunch of kind of bitter notes that people tend to like, and also helps preserve the beer. But you can’t add as many hops to non-alcoholic beer.

GARVES: It’s just that very strong, bitter flavors with non-alcoholic composition creates sort of just a really unpleasant bitterness that’s more on the, like, astringency side. And so hop loads are lowered.

TWILLEY: But then, at least for an IPA or something that’s supposed to taste hoppy, that hoppy flavor is often added back, just as a flavoring.

GARVES: Yeah, some breweries will add terpenes, hop derived terpenes to get those flavors in.

GRABER: Hops are kind of an obvious one, but there are other flavors that beer makers want to add in. Wes mentioned that when wine or beer goes through the vacuum distillation process, other chemical compounds that have a similar boiling point to ethanol also evaporate off. Sometimes beer makers can add some of those chemical compounds, those flavors, back in.

TWILLEY: But also, it’s not just about replacing missing flavors. Think about it: craft brewers already throw in pretty much anything and everything into their brews to create exciting beers—things like fruit, chocolate, vanilla beans, mint, you name it. But, guess what? Non-alcoholic brewers can add any and all of those things to help mask missing or underwhelming flavors in theirs.

GRABER: For example, sours are a kind of beer that are often made with wild yeast, and they tend to be more acidic, more sour, than other kinds of beers. And so regular brewers might add fruit to complement the beer because it already has a tart, almost fruity note. This is a great tool for non-alcoholic brewers, too.

GARVES: You can fruit sours pretty easily. And fruit is an excellent way to hide that there’s no alcohol in, in your beverage. It will give you a bigger mouthfeel. It’ll give you another hero flavor to sort of focus on. Oh, I love raspberries. You know, you care less about what’s going on if you love raspberries.

TWILLEY: This idea of beer styles that work particularly well as non-alcoholic versions is intriguing—I mean, it makes sense that it’s easier to remove alcohol from a beer that already has a lot else going on.

GARVES: A porter, a stout. These are beers that have a lot of complexity and flavor, so that you’re maybe not missing—it’s harder to pick up those flavors that you’re missing or lacking.

GRABER: Dana told us that it’s kind of counter-intuitive, but the smaller craft producers have a leg up on big companies here, because they can play with whatever they want and they’re not trying to recreate a beloved existing product.

GARVES: Whereas if you’re looking at say… Heineken Double Zero. They have an obligation to make double zero taste exactly like the other Heineken. The Heineken in a green bottle, with the four percent alcohol, right? And so they have a harder task. They have to match—while taking stuff out and putting stuff in, they have to match this flavor. It’s very, very difficult. It takes a huge group of scientists. Which Heineken does have. But when your brewery isn’t trying to recreate something, it gets a blank canvas to start from.

TWILLEY: So, moment of truth: let’s taste some of these canvases. I had purchased a six pack of Athletic’s Wit, which is their non-alcoholic take on a Belgian white.

BALDWIN: The smell is vegetal. I feel like I just put my nose into a garden gone bad.

TWILLEY: This is my hopefully not former friend Rosecrans who came round to join Geoff and me in our non-alcoholic adventures.

BALDWIN: It has a little bit of orange and citrus, like a Belgian wants to. But, in defense of the nation of Belgium, this is nothing I want to drink again.

MANAUGH: Yeah, the smell is extraordinary. It smells like… V8. It smells like a tomato juice, is what it smells like. It’s very strange. It’s not at all what I was expecting. It’s amazing, actually. Wow.

TWILLEY: [GIGGLING] The face.

MANAUGH: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t choose to drink this outside of a Gastropod episode.

GRABER: I was doing my tasting with my spouse Tim and with our friend Jeremy, who wrote in with the original question. We tried the Athletic Wit as well, and we didn’t hate it quite as much as you all did, Nicky, but we didn’t love it. We did get to do a fun experiment where I bought a Notch pilsner and then the exact same Notch pilsner but without alcohol, and Tim set up a blind tasting for Jeremy and me.

[CAN OPENING]

[BEERS POURING]

BUNTEL: Does that sound non-alcoholic to you?

GRABER: That sounds bubbly.

BUNTEL: All right. We are ready. We have two glasses for each of you to taste. Same glass. Same style of beer.

ROTHMAN-SHORE: I’m pretty sure that this is the non-alcoholic one. It smells the same, but it’s like that sense of like, there’s something missing in it that I think of the moment I drink something alcoholic.

GRABER: I also got it right, the nose was immediately a little off, a little sweeter. But in general, it was really close to the original, just a little, maybe, kind of watery. It was respectable.

ROTHMAN-SHORE: The Notch does linger better. Yeah. It, I still notice the absence, but it lingers in a way that the Athletic Belgian just does not.

GRABER: Athletic is the really famous one, but I have to say, I think the Notch is a better version of the beer that the athletic is.

TWILLEY: Here in Los Angeles, we hated all our beers but as it turns out that was the evening’s high point, because when we moved onto wine, that’s when things really went tits up.

GRABER: To be honest, we were kind of expecting things to not be so great based on what Wes told us. We said already that some compounds get lost with the ethanol, but it turns out that when it comes to wine, well, nearly all the important flavor compounds get lost.

TWILLEY: One of the reasons for this is that, like we said, there’s just more alcohol in wine, as a general rule, and so you have to cook it for longer to get all the booze out, and so you lose more flavor—even in the fancy spinning cone set up.

PEARSON: We haven’t hacked that one yet. So some of the research that we’re doing is trying to then remove that flavor that has come into the ethanol. Remove that from the ethanol, be able to put it back in the wine.

TWILLEY: This is a big challenge. Wes told us that the particular flavor notes that make a Riesling taste like a Riesling—right now they all evaporate alongside the booze.

PEARSON: They are essential to that—you know, if we’re trying to make a product that resembles Riesling so that consumer can look at this bottle and go, yeah, that’s a Riesling. They open it up and they pour it in their glass and it smells and tastes like Riesling, just without the ethanol. That’s going to be important step for us to really kind of crack the code, getting those flavors back in there.

GRABER: Not all of the flavor notes come out in the distillation, Wes told us that one particular New Zealand superstar is a little bit better positioned to become non-alcoholic.

PEARSON: Some of the thiol compounds in Sauvignon Blanc, so the compounds that make Sauvignon Blanc smell grassy or, like grapefruit or passion fruit. They do stay in the original wine. Which is a reason why we see Sauvignon Blanc often used as a base for de-alcoholized wine. It’s kind of like one of the starting points.

TWILLEY: That said, that de-alcoholized base—even in Sauvignon Blanc, Wes told us he’d be able to tell it wasn’t real wine quite easily.

PEARSON: Oh, yeah. [CHUCKLE] Absolutely. In fact, it’s pretty… you know, I used the word shocking earlier in our chat and, and, when the, when the dealcoholized wine comes off the spinning cone, what the product tastes like.

TWILLEY: Picture Wes shaking his head a little mournfully here

GRABER: Because think of what you’ve done to your wine.

PEARSON: So you’ve removed all the ethanol and you’ve concentrated the product by, you know, by 30%. So all of the acids are now much more powerful. You’ve got more acid, you’ve got your pH is lower and you don’t have any flavor left. And so when it comes off the spinning cone, it is not particularly pleasant. So when you compare that to a traditional wine, it’s, you’re, it’s, yeah, it’s hard to believe that they are actually the same thing at one point. Now, then the work begins, right? To try to build that product back up to make it look like the original product.

TWILLEY: Brewers obviously have to do this too—like Dana said, they add flavor back in. But it’s really a more uphill challenge with wine.

PEARSON: Beer has, you’ve got more tools in the toolbox. Right? Wine, it’s grapes. That’s it.

GRABER: Yes and kind of no. First of course there’s yeast, and Wes told us that winemakers are playing around with selecting the kinds of yeast that will fart out more of the wine flavors they want, maybe even flavors that won’t disappear along with the ethanol.

TWILLEY: And then even when it comes to the grapes, there’s stuff winemakers can do—there’s varieties like Sauvignon Blanc that have flavors that survive the spinning cone and you can change you grow your grapes to reduce the sugar levels in them and thus the starting level of alcohol in the wine. That all can help.

GRABER: Another thing winemakers can play with—and this is something most people don’t know—there are actually dozens of official ingredients that wine makers can add in minute amounts to tweak their final product. So non-alcoholic wine makers are playing with all of those.

PEARSON: In Australia here, we tend to see more using like wine permissible additives. Gum arabics, adding tannin, trying to build some of that texture into the, into the non-alcoholic wines.

TWILLEY: Some winemakers add extra sugar to add some of the missing body and mouthfeel that you lose when you take out ethanol. Sparkling winemakers have a slightly easier go of it because the carbonation helps with that too. Still, it’s not simple.

GRABER: We asked Wes if he’s ever had an alcoholic and a non-alcoholic wine side by side where he couldn’t tell the difference.

PEARSON: Now that would be the holy grail, really, would be to have one that you can’t pick. No, we’re not there yet, but we’re working on it.

TWILLEY: That said, even in the past five years, Wes told us he’s noticed a significant improvement.

PEARSON: I still don’t think they’re at a point where people are going to go, yeah, it tastes exactly like wine. It’s not. That’s not there yet. But there’s certainly a few sparkling wine examples that are pretty good. You’d happily have a glass.

GRABER: So what do these new and improved non-alcoholic wines taste like? Would we happily have a glass? That’s coming up, after the break.

[BREAK]

GRABER: Jeremy, Tim and I started our non-alcoholic wine tasting with a Riesling. I bought it because I knew that Riesling was one of the first non-alcoholic wines ever from the 1800s.

BUNTEL: This is the Dr. Lo Riesling. [SCREW TOP OPENING] Alcohol-removed Riesling.

[WINE POURING]

GRABER: [SNIFFING] Oh, actually it has a, it has a Riesling nose. [SNIFF, LAUGHING] It smells like wine, but it tastes like grape juice. [LAUGH]

BUNTEL: Oh dear. Yeah. Poor maligned Riesling. [LAUGH] Riesling already has such a terrible reputation as being just kind of, sweet and flat. Which is totally undeserved when you get a good Riesling. But. This is kind of a roller rink birthday party grape juice for me.

GRABER: We’d heard that red wines were supposed to be even harder to make taste good and balanced, and so of course I had to buy a red to see how bad it would actually be.

GRABER: Okay. So here, shall we try the red? I’m now even more nervous about this. [SNIFFING]

BUNTEL: Oh. Eughh. Yeah, I think they tried to give it a little… something that’s supposed to be like a tannin? That, that has a bit of this puckery dry thing, but it simply just takes bad juice and makes it a little off.

GRABER: It tasted a little like cough syrup but without the alcohol.

TWILLEY: Which really raises the question: why? Meanwhile, in LA, I set myself the ultimate challenge with a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc head to head. We started with the non-alcoholic one. Wes had said it was one of the better varieties to work with but, mmm..

BALDWIN: I’m literally frowning because of how depressing this is. It’s, it’s slightly flavored water is what it is. It does not taste like Sauvignon Blanc. It does taste like someone winked at a lemon and then poured some water in a glass and chilled it down.

[NICKY LAUGHING]

BALDWIN: There are no tannins, there’s no structure. It’s flat in the same way that water is flat. It is yellow.

GRABER: Of course with a sales pitch like that, you listeners know that Nicky had to try it too.

TWILLEY: What the… actual? Like, selling that as a Sauvignon Blanc.

TWILLEY: Rosecrans was depressed, I just felt cheated. We then made ourselves even sadder by having a sip of the real deal alongside it.

TWILLEY: I mean, part of the problem is like—it’s how it feels in your mouth.

BALDWIN: Yeah, because here—this is real wine we’re drinking now. This is the Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc. You can feel it sort of grip the inside of your mouth. It’s not cloying. It’s just that there’s traction.

GRABER: Okay: so far, no winners. But there are some other options out there these days. Like we said, there’s a long history of drinks made with fruit that are packaged in a pretty bottle and look like wine, like, say Martinelli’s sparkling cider. And now there are a lot more of them, and they’re more creative with a whole list of interesting ingredients, and they’re sold like wine but they’re not wine.

TWILLEY: I had grabbed one of these wine-like non-wines to add to the party, it’s literally called Non.

MANAUGH: Alright, this is a salted raspberry and chamomile Non wine. Non is the name of the brand. It’s made in Australia.

[LOUD FIZZ, GLUGGING]

BALDWIN: Fizzy, raspberry colored. Looks like a nice sparkling wine. Nothing to say that this is not a handsome glass of sparkling rose.

TWILLEY: The smell is a little… I mean, you have to like raspberry. And chamomile. Oh, but it’s actually quite nice. Yeah.

BALDWIN: Yeah, it’s not unpleasant at all. This is the best thing that we’ve had all night.

MANAUGH: Mmm. Okay, yeah, so I would definitely tap out of this pretty quickly. What I would say in the favor of this though is that, yeah, it’s just trying to be itself.

TWILLEY: In a way, the Non was just a grown up complicated seltzer—which, you know, I like seltzer, and I happily drink it at social events when I don’t want alcohol.

GRABER: But seltzer wasn’t enough for Lisa King, she’s a business woman in New Zealand and she recently founded a company called Free AF, they make little cans of non-alcoholic cocktails.

LISA KING: Particularly here in New Zealand, we have a super heavy drinking culture. And, going out and telling people that you’re not drinking was just so awkward. And every time, you know, people would be like, why, what’s wrong with you? Like, you know, are you pregnant? Are you sick? And then, you know, they would keep encouraging me to drink, even though I said I wasn’t drinking.

TWILLEY: And Lisa’s local bars were sadly not plentifully stocked with interesting seltzers or craft mocktails.

KING: When you went out, it was very much your soft drinks and juice. And it was really sugary. You know, you never felt like you could sit down and have a few of them. And it made me feel… just, like, left out because they were like kids drinks. It felt like you were relegated to the kids table. You know, with your little orange juice, your little Coke. And everyone else is having these beautiful drinks, you know, with beautiful ice and garnish and beautiful glasses and having a really good time.

GRABER: And so just a few years ago, Lisa started her company. Her goal was to make her favorite drink, a gin and tonic, but without the booze. So she didn’t plan on starting with gin and trying to get the booze out.

KING: Which just seemed really… difficult. And also didn’t really make sense. It’s like: why do you want to start with alcohol if you want to take it out? And so I thought, why not start with actually, what are the flavors that we want to build? And using natural flavor technology to get those different layers and the complexity that you get in a really good cocktail.

TWILLEY: Lisa worked with a flavor company to formulate her recipe to taste like a cucumber-y G&T. But even once she had the taste right, it didn’t feel right in her mouth.

KING: And it’s that little burn that you get from, you know, when you drink a spirit, and from alcohol. It’s the aftertaste. It’s that mouthfeel and texture and depth that was just missing from so many of the other things that I was tasting. And so we went and found this natural botanical, and we called it Afterglow. And it gives you this little burn at the back of your throat when you’re drinking our drinks. And so you feel like you’re having alcohol.

GRABER: The exact formulation is a company secret, but on the website it says that it’s a product of a capsicum, which is a pepper. And so you know it’s somehow a version of capsaicin, the thing that makes hot peppers hot.

TWILLEY: Lisa started with a non-alcoholic G&T but she’s now got a whole line of alcohol free canned cocktails, there’s her version of an aperol spritz and a paloma and more. And she says the Afterglow really makes it feel like a cocktail.

KING: We’ve definitely had people who’ve had, you know, AF and they’re like, I’m just—are you sure there’s no alcohol in this?

GRABER: At our Somerville non-alcoholic bash, we decided to try a real gin and tonic against Lisa’s. Tim mixed his version up.

BUNTEL: And we’re going to take just a little bit of lime.

[LIME SQUEEZING, LIQUID SPLASHING IN, METAL STIRRING SOUND, CAN OPENING]

TWILLEY: We also did a side by side, ours was blind for me and Rosecrans and then Geoff forgot which was which by the time he came to taste it. So it was a real test.

BALDWIN: Okay, well, so I’ve been presented with a handsome glass, a massive ice cube, and a clear liquid. I’m going to give it a smell. [SNIFF] It smells like a floral gin. [SNIFF] It’s very cold to the touch. Here goes a taste. [SIP] That is not a gin and tonic.

MANAUGH: If you gave this to me, I would not think it was a gin and tonic literally at all. It’s a, it’s cucumber water. I mean, sure, it’s refreshing.
CUT

TWILLEY: None of us had any trouble determining which was the alcoholic version.

TWILLEY: Yeah, this is the G&T. It’s a, it’s an actual gin and tonic.

BALDWIN: What percentage are you confident?

TWILLEY: Oh, I mean, I would swear on my life.

TWILLEY: Fortunately I was correct.

GRABER: We didn’t do it blind, we knew we started with the real one.

GRABER: Has that kind of very typical London gin note to it, the juniper. Has like the roundness of the alcohol.

ROTHMAN-SHORE: That is a great gin and tonic. I would happily come to your bar anytime.

GRABER: You happy with your gin and tonic, Tim?

BUNTEL: I think it’s terrific. Yeah. You know, sometimes a lemon, sometimes a lime, but great gin, nice tonic, can’t be beat.

GRABER: And then we tried the AF version. It did have a little burn, after a few sips my chest kind of warmed up the way it does when I start sipping a cocktail. But like a weak cocktail at a not particularly fancy bar.

BUNTEL: Yeah. If you, if you had not-great tonic and not-great gin and you let a bunch of ice cubes melt in it? This is kind of what, where I think you might arrive.

ROTHMAN-SHORE: I feel like it’s relying on the cucumber to carry the first half of it, right. To like, make you feel like you’re drinking something. But that’s something like, I could see like, if you go out to a bar with friends, like, the person who’s getting this still feels like they’re drinking… something, right? It’s maybe not the best gin and tonic that they’ve ever had, but it’s still festive and cucumbery and like. You can feel like you’re having a good time with everyone else drinking their drinks.

GRABER: And that’s part of the reason that people are drinking them these days: they want to go out with their friends, they want to have a good time, but maybe they don’t like how they feel afterwards if they’re drinking, or maybe they’re concerned about the fact that the World Health Organization recently called any amount of alcohol a carcinogen.

TWILLEY: So the question is, do these kinds of drinks help people who want to cut down, cut down? It seems like they should, but do they?

GRABER: Molly Bowdring is at the Stanford Prevention Center, and she’s studying this. She’s researching the public health impact of non-alcoholic beverages. And she told us that the way these drinks are marketed is really interesting—they’re sometimes described as a substitute for alcohol, but sometimes it’s just like an addition, another way to drink an alcohol-ish thing at places where you normally wouldn’t, like at the gym or in a car.

MOLLY BOWDRING: I actually saw an ad on Amazon for a non-alcoholic beer variety pack that said something along the lines of whether you’re pregnant, can’t drink, won’t drink, or need to operate heavy machinery, this pack is for you. So really sort of saying anytime, anywhere is fine.

GRABER: Molly told us that from a public health perspective, the goal of these things for her would be that they help people who are recovering from problem drinking, that it helps keep them away from alcohol.

TWILLEY: But she says we can’t yet say that that’s the case.

BOWDRING: Yeah, so we don’t have a lot of data on whether these drinks are actually helpful for people who are recovering from alcohol use disorder or trying to reduce their use. Clinically, I’ve seen a fair amount of people use them in attempt to support their moderation or abstinence goals. And I’ve seen varying degrees of success. So for people who have found them to be successful, they often will report things like: it was helpful to have a non-alcoholic beverage in my hand when I was socializing with people who were drinking. And I didn’t feel like I had to call attention to the fact that I was no longer consuming alcohol. On the other hand, for folks who have shared with me that they’ve had trouble using non-alcoholic beverages to support their reduced alcohol consumption. They’ve described that having that similar taste leads to the desire for the full strength alcohol, to get intoxicated.

TWILLEY: So anecdotally, it seems as though the evidence is mixed. But Molly is trying to fill these gaps with actual data as we speak.

BOWDRING: So I’m starting a study now that involves giving people breathalyzers and asking them questions multiple times throughout the day to track their non-alcoholic beverage use and alcohol use. To be able to start to map out: on days when people consume non-alcoholic beverages, do they end up consuming more or less alcohol than they otherwise would.

GRABER: We’ll see what she comes up with. And then another important question from a public health perspective is the impact these drinks will have on underage drinking, will they increase it, decrease it.

BOWDRING: We don’t have a ton of great data on whether people under 21 are consuming them, at least in the US. But there is some data outside of the US, particularly in Asia, and some studies in Japan specifically that have shown that even people as young as elementary school age have consumed non-alcoholic beverages. And when we think about the potential impact of this, there’s some concern, because it can socialize youth to the look, taste, and even the brand of non-alcoholic beverages.

TWILLEY: Molly told us that she’s found that 39 out of 50 US states have no rules on how old you have to be to buy a non-alcoholic beverage.

BOWDRING: Meaning that if you’re 12 years old, technically you could walk into a store and legally purchase a non-alcoholic beer. However, retailers are able to make their own decisions about whether or not they want to card and permit that.

GRABER: We mentioned how these drinks are marketed, but how they’re marketed to kids could really matter, too.

BOWDRING: So if there are restrictions on marketing alcohol near schools, for example, would it be permitted to market a non-alcoholic product? So if we’re thinking about not marketing Guinness, but marketing Guinness 0.0, is that something that’s permitted? This issue of, sort of alibi marketing, or surrogate marketing, where marketing the non-alcoholic product then still exposes people to the full strength brand, is something that I, I think, regulators will, will need to consider.

TWILLEY: So there’s actually a lot of questions still to be answered about the overall benefits of these drinks. But, right now, really, it seems like the main use case for these beverages is, if I felt self-conscious about not drinking and wanted to hold something that looked alcoholic. As it happens, I don’t, and so I would typically choose a seltzer because the flavor of these alcohol substitutes is just disappointing.

GRABER: Luckily these days, bars and restaurants often even have options beyond seltzer. At least where Nicky and I live, a lot of bartenders are whipping up fantastic, creative mocktails, and these can be great alternatives. But in general, even the bottled and canned sector is growing. So there’s clearly a market, and as things get better, maybe it’ll be easier to switch.

PEARSON: The product doesn’t have to be exactly the same, but it has to be close enough. We’re not quite there yet, but I think that’s what we’re aiming for. If you are a consumer, you understand that there might be a trade off—beer, non-alcoholic beer be the same way, right? You understand there’s a trade off, but you also get the benefit of the, you know, a healthy choice. And so, I’ll give a little to get a little, right?

GRABER: Wes’s personal favorite and professional responsibility, wine, that’s a really tough one to crack. First, there’s more alcohol than beer, as we said. But also, when you go and buy a particular kind of wine at the store, you have a really strong expectation of what you’re going to get. If you buy a Napa Cabernet, even an alcohol-free one, you expect it to be like a Napa Cabernet. And it just is not right now.

TWILLEY: On top of that, the sheer cost of the best technology today, the spinning cone—Wes says that’s been a real barrier to experimentation.

PEARSON: And so in the wine industry anyway, for many, many, many years, we’ve seen a lot of the innovation part driven by small producers. They don’t have massive operations. They can afford to take risks. And, and, you know, and we learn things from that as time goes on. That’s never happened with these processes, because there’s a huge barrier to entry for most producers. Right? These machines are north of a million dollars. Small, medium wineries are not throwing around that kind of cash just to buy a machine so they can play around with it. So a lot of that innovation has been missed.

GRABER: A lot of the innovation these days is happening with small, nimble companies that aren’t trying to make alcohol-free versions of something you already love—like Non, building this new non-wine, wine-like drink from the ground up.

TWILLEY: That way they can just make something that tastes sophisticated and refreshing and looks like a glass of rose or whatever, but isn’t. That’s kind of the Free AF approach too, even though they are trying to mimic the real thing more closely—but they aren’t constrained by having to make something and then remove the booze.

GRABER: Right, like for their paloma, they don’t take a grapefruit soda and mix it with tequila and then cook the alcohol out, they just build it up from the ground up. Side note, I did actually buy a booze-free tequila, just to try it—here’s our response when we first opened the bottle…

BUNTEL: Ooh. Oh, it smells terrible. This smells like, like bad shipping supplies, that you opened a box with bad plastic and adhesives.

GRABER: It smells like, like cleaning alcohol and feet.

ROTHMAN-SHORE: I was at the car mechanic this morning. That smelled better than this.

GRABER: [SNIFF] Nail polish remover, but it’s like, non-alcoholic. I don’t understand it. Why would you—ooh.

GRABER: The taste was no better. It tasted like pineapple juice, cayenne pepper, and solvent. It was vile.

TWILLEY: Listen I was not impressed, really, by anything I drank for this episode.

GRABER: I will say we really didn’t mind the Notch pilsner, it was decent.

TWILLEY: Fair, and also my friend Rosecrans told me I should be more tolerant. Even though non-alcoholic drinks do have a long history, it’s very short compared to the human history with alcohol.

BALDWIN: This is a new field, right? There’s appetite for this out there. I understand why makers are trying to meet that demand. Nothing here I ever want to drink again. But you know, first steps.

GRABER: The industry thinks that this field IS going to keep improving, and growing. Dana said that beer makers are a little nervous, and we’ve heard the same about wine makers, they’re worried about losing their market. But really, if I have to make a prediction, I’m going to say that alcoholic beer and wine and cocktails are not going to be disappearing any time soon. We still love them, and we’re not alone.

GARVES: I don’t think we’re going anywhere. I think that we just have to move over and make room for a new emerging beverage. Which is this non-alcoholic sector.

TWILLEY: More is more! Cheers to that!

BALDWIN: I want it on the record that Rosecrans grabbed the real G&T and is now keeping it for himself.

[MUSIC UP]

GRABER: Some of you may be thinking: wait, you just said that alcohol has been classified as a carcinogen! Really? But it’s true. There’s research that shows drinking any alcohol can contribute to a slight rise in the likelihood of certain kinds of cancer.

TWILLEY: We’ve talked about things being classified as carcinogens on the show before. There’s research that shows that eating cured meat, which includes bacon and sausage and hot dogs—eating that contributes to a rise in the likelihood of certain kinds of cancer, and so all cured meats are also classified as carcinogens. But here’s the thing with carcinogens: there’s a lot of them out there, we’re exposed to them almost all the time, and so it’s not something you can avoid altogether.

GRABER: That said, with both cured meat and alcohol, you can choose how you want to moderate your exposure. For some people, having alcohol listed as a carcinogen is enough for them to stop drinking any at all. For others, cured meat falls into that category. For us, we’ve considered the research, and we both have decided to enjoy what we enjoy in moderation.

TWILLEY: These things are decisions you have to make for yourself. As is whether you like the taste of the current range of substitutes, so please feel free to keep enjoying them if you do!

GRABER: Thanks this episode to Wes Pearson, Dana Garves, Molly Bowdring, and Lisa King, you can find links to their companies and research on our website gastropod.com.

TWILLEY: We also owe a huge thanks to our producer, Claudia Geib, as always, and to our long-suffering spouses, Geoff and Tim, and our equally long-suffering friends, Jeremy Rothman-Shore, stalwart Gastropod fan and supporter, and Rosecrans Baldwin, whose latest book is called Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles.

GRABER: We’ll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode, till then!