The unwillingly sober person's guide to alcohol free drinking.
Part One
People who have followed me for a bit are probably aware I’ve been recovering from acute necrotising pancreatitis since last June. This has had its up and downs. One down is that I can’t drink alcohol—possibly ever again, but if not, still as a very limited once every so often treat. (My pancreatitis was caused by my gallbladder—since removed—not alcohol, but in term of safe-guarding your pancreas, it’s all about the same.) And I’m not at the little every so often treat stage yet. So.
What to drink instead? This is the question. Coffee and tea are fine but don’t completely work as replacements. Juice is fine but is for kids. Soda is fine but is for kids. Both of these last two things are also sweet, which isn’t always what you want. But as far as sophisticated options for adults go, they’re harder to find.
First, a traditional option: a shrub. These are vinegar-fruit syrups that you mix with sparkling water or tonic or whatever. You can make shrubs or you can buy them from various places to see if you like the concept first. (I like this one from Weathertop Farm.)
Shrubs are great—though they are going to tend toward the sweeter end of things. If you make them (I have not tried this yet) you have almost infinite control over what goes into them. Especially as a summer cocktail replacement, I think they’re probably hard to beat.1 But they aren’t going to fill the same niche as a martini or a glass of wine.
Another traditional-but-sweet option—one I haven’t gotten around to but remember from childhood—is resurrecting a version of the Italian soda and drinking some combination of syrup and sparkling water. There are lot of interesting options out there—rose syrup and lingonberry and woodruff and so on. You can also make syrups on your own. (There’s a recipe for juniper syrup here that looks pretty good.)
And if you want to feel cool while you prepare this, try this soda siphon. (Or, if you live in New York, these guys.) Asta sends his regards!
There are also some non-alcoholic fermented beverages that I have not tried but you can try: smreka (fermented juniper), kvass (fermented bread) (mostly non-alcoholic), rejuvelac (fermented wheatberries). And there’s kombucha, of course. And probably a bunch of other drinks I’m not thinking of now.
Here’s what great about most of these options: you can make them yourself, they can have some ritual built in, and they all have enough of a history that you don’t feel permanently stuck at the kids’ table. Also, if I were hosting a party, shrubs and syrups would probably be how I’d go, for reasons we’ll get to.
But maybe you just want to buy a bottle of something and drink it. This is understandable. As they say in The Leopard, however, for things to stay the same, everything will have to change.2 Among things that have to change is the understandable assumption you have right now that at least you’re about to save some money. Everything is just as expensive and that goes double for wine. (And this is why you should do something else for your party.)
The first thing you need to know is that you basically cannot sip non-alcoholic spirits. I mean you can but it won’t be a great experience. Even the very best of them are not sippable in the way real gin or bourbon is, and they’re going to taste kind of like the LaCroix version of whatever alcohol you’re drinking. Some spirits will say you can sip them. I cannot speak for every single one of these but mostly, they’re wrong. I have definitely tried it. It’s not always a bad experience but it’s just not how they’re drunk. Since my drink of choice in the past was “gin poured over ice” this has been a real shift for me.
The good news is you can work with this even if you’re very lazy: soda water, or lemon water, or a little bitters,3 or some combination of all of these, will probably do you fine. There’s no need to drag out a cocktail shaker. And you also have a little non-alcoholic powerhorse at your disposal called Wilfred’s. Wilfred’s is not a Campari dupe if you just sip it with soda (though it’s perfectly fine) but when mixed with other stuff it adds a similar complexity. An ounce of Wilfred’s, an ounce of the “clear spirit” of your choice, soda, bitters if you feel like it—this is perfectly nice. I end a lot of evenings this way.
If you want a non-alcoholic spirit that is as close to the real thing as possible, you should probably try the somewhat annoyingly named NKD LDY. I’ve tried their whiskey and their gin and the whiskey is genuinely kind of uncanny—smells just like real booze.4 (This is because these are dealcoholized beverages.) I haven’t tried the tequila yet, though I do have a bottle. The gin is very nice mixed with Wilfred’s+soda or lemon water.
But there’s a lot of stuff out there that is not trying to be any specific spirit and is instead meant to be a new taste altogether. Of all of these, my favorite is Pentire Seaward. The Seaward is just great: citrus-y, a little sour, and with an indescribable, almost cinnamon taste that I found out is the woodruff. I love it. It would honestly be great mixed with gin or vodka but you know… that’s not why we’re here.
The more staid clear “spirit” from Pentire is Adrift. Adrift is also good—it’s a little salty and tastes great with tonic. I would pretty happily drink it but my heart belongs to Seaward.5
Gnista Floral Wormwood and Gnista Barreled Oak are both trying to fill the niche that stuff like Fernet Brance or Chartreuse or Benedictine or amaros or what have you occupies. (The Floral Wormwood really reminded me of Cardamaro.) I drank both of these over ice because that was how it was recommended, but if I were to buy them again, I’d try mixing it up more.
Woodnose Sacré is exceedingly weird and, just to be honest, the only thing where I haven’t finished the bottle. Buuuut… I didn’t dislike it, honestly. It takes like chocolate and coffee and balsamic vinegar and I just couldn’t figure out the right way to tap into it and it was too intense to drink all the time. I’ll probably try it again sometime.
Non-alcoholic wine is surprisingly fine, but it’s way too expensive. You are basically drinking a nice cheap wine at a 100% markup. I’ve had Noughty’s sparkling wines and the No & Low sparkling Chardonnay and they’re both fine. I really have nothing bad to say about them. They just cost too much, so they have to be special occasion only wines, and they’re not, well, special occasion wines.
That said… you will not regret having some of this on hand for a special occasion where everybody’s going to have a glass of bubbly, like New Year’s. You will enjoy yourself and you won’t feel left out and the feeling is enough like real drinking that you might even get psychosomatically tipsy.
As is obvious, I’ve really barely scratched the surface of the non-alcoholic world. (There are many big brands I haven’t even touched on.) But I wanted to do a little roundup here.
Finding out I probably wasn’t going to be able to drink anymore, or else in an extremely limited capacity, was really rough and having a new world to explore has been really helpful. Because I’ve been so sick the usual much toted benefits of sobriety like “having lots of energy” are not happening in compensation either.
But life goes on, even if everything’s different.
My mother believes that very, very fine balsamic vinegar in some soda water would make an excellent drink too but this, I have not tried.
By way of housekeeping, I’ve mostly ordered my non-alcoholic alcohol from this website, but it can stall out, so I’m not linking to it for the individual beverages.
I wouldn’t recommend this to somebody who needs to be sober for addiction reasons, but for the rest of us, I think the amount of alcohol in bitters is basically ignorable. Also, soda with bitters is a perfectly respectable drink. I also would make a very “dry” martini with a vermouth rinse under the same principle, but haven’t actually done this yet for lack of vermouth. But anyway, there are also non-alcoholic bitters.
Also mixes pretty well with a Cherry Coke Zero, you know, if you’re into that….
It looks like Pentire just launched a new drink, which I have not tried, but I will. I’m gonna be honest… they’re far and away my favorite of the NA companies I’ve tried.