Why booze-free booze isn't free: Shoddy Goods 005
Hey, Jason Toon here with the fifth issue of Shoddy Goods, the newsletter about the stuff people make, buy, and sell. More people are looking into non-alcoholic drinks that still give the taste and experience of having a drink, but often are surprised by the prices. I wanted to find out why alcohol-free didn't come with a discount.
OK, nobody freak out, but in early 2023, I was diagnosed with cancer. Stage 3 colon cancer, specifically, or "bowel cancer" as Australians call it with their characteristic bluntness. I'm pretty much fine now, fingers crossed. But I had to go through six months of chemo to get here, during which alcohol was verboten. (Just when I needed a drink the most…)
To be honest, I'd been moving that way anyway. Hangovers, feeling stupid, feeling stupid about hangovers: the pleasure-to-pain ratio has been tilting bad for a while. The experience of chemo sealed the deal. Imagine a hangover that lasts six months and wasn't even caused by anything fun. So yeah, I was ready to never get drunk again.
But the rituals of drinking were harder to give up. I still wanted a complex, bracing cocktail before dinner, or a beer on the softball field, just without the alcohol. And I thought, hey, maybe while I'm at it, I'll save some money, too. Soda's cheap. Coffee's cheap. Water's cheap. Non-alcoholic drinks should be just as cheap, right?
Uh, no. While there are booze-free offerings at all price points, their prices pretty much correspond to their alcoholic analogues. It got me wondering why, and judging by online chatter, I'm not the only one. I soon learned it's the wrong question to ask.
I'm glad you're getting sober, Google, but don't be such a cheapskate about it.
From bribery to brewery
To disabuse me of my foolish assumptions, I turned to somebody who knows what he's talking about. Andy McMillan is one of the founders of Heck, a non-alcoholic craft brewery in Portland, Oregon. McMillan first noticed the thirst for alcohol-free drinks while running the XOXO Festival, an intentionally small but mighty annual gathering of people doing interesting things online.
"We have a lot of people who come to the festival who don't drink for myriad reasons," McMillan says. "Fully one-third of U.S. adults don't drink at all. There's another third that would have, like, a glass of champagne or a little cocktail on their birthday kind of thing."
Then McMillan happened to visit the Getaway Bar in New York, a pioneering venue for the new non-alcoholic cocktail movement (slogan: "Don't Drink with Us"). That inspired him to open a "zero-proof" pop-up bar in Portland called Suckerpunch with Portland bartender and caterer Matt Mount.
Rather than try in vain to imitate the standards, Suckerpunch planted its flag for original drinks that aspired to the complexity of classic cocktails without mimicking them. "We were building all of these drinks around novel base components like tea, kombucha, you know, some of the other novel spirit alternatives that weren't parroting liquor."
After a booming response, a long pandemic-induced shutdown, and six months of packed houses, Suckerpunch lost their pop-up space and McMillan lost his illusions about the rigors of running a hospitality business. It closed in August 2022.
But the response to Suckerpunch's house beer, brewed by longtime Portland brewing expert Justin Miller, got McMillan thinking. "Someone tried to slip me 20 bucks to take a six-pack home. I was like, 'I can't let you do that, because if you leave it out in the sun and try to drink it two weeks later, it'll be alcoholic.'"
But they took it as an auspicious omen for their next move. "It was like, yeah, okay, that's gonna be a very good anecdote for investors." The first Heck beer, their Silver Linings IPA, rolled off the line this March, followed by the Gentle Persuasion Golden. It's priced about the same as any other local craft six-pack, at $15.
Alcohol isn't expensive, people are
McMillan explains to me that there are two ways to make non-alcoholic beer. The more common way in the past, especially for big corporate brewers, is to make regular beer, then remove the alcohol.
"You can't just go in and find the alcohol and only the alcohol," he says. "You end up ripping a lot of the body and the flavor and the subtlety out of the beer. That's traditionally how non-alcoholic beer has been made. And that's why non-alcoholic beer has a bad reputation, because it tastes watered back and it tastes like it's not full and complete and intentional."
The other way to do it is to control the brewing process so that it never quite turns alcoholic. That's what Heck does.
"We brew our beer like a beer, so it costs the same as making a beer," he says. "We're controlling the fermentation, so it doesn't become alcoholic. And that requires using different strains of yeast and different products in the beer. But it means that our costs are relatively similar to making a regular beer. It's still the same malt bill, we're still ordering hops, it's the same amount of water."
So, one method is a similar process to making standard beer. The other method is making standard beer, then doing more stuff to it. Nothing about this makes NA beer cheaper to make. It all has to be done by people, and takes time, which means it takes money.
"The most expensive part of these businesses is people," McMillan says. "People are expensive. And taking care of people is expensive."
Huh, looks like beer to me. Photo by Jessica Zollman Winslow (@jayzombie), courtesy of Heck.
It's harder to mimic alcohol than to make it
A lot of the characteristics we associate with alcoholic drinks are byproducts of the alcohol itself, especially with the highest-alcohol drinks: liquor. Think of the body of whiskey or gin, that verrry slightly heaviness and viscosity. There aren't many other substances that can mimic that. And the most common one - sugar - is also something people are tending to avoid these days. Is a super-sugary "virgin" cocktail really any better for you than the hard stuff?
"It's definitely an endemic condition to like, sort of to replace the strong flavor of alcohol," McMillan says. "A lot of non-alcoholic drinks just pile on the sugar."
The ethanol in alcohol also allows it to absorb flavors more deeply than water, and to absorb flavors that aren't water-soluble. Approaching the complexity and variety of a half-decent spirit requires NA distillers to get creative, exploring techniques from the pharmaceutical and perfume industries. All of which, again, takes time, people, and money.
And don't forget the burn. The bracing edge that's essential to liquor might be the most elusive quality to capture. Mark Livings, head of the London-based non-alcoholic distiller Lyre's, told Wired they "use things like Sichuan pepper, capsicum, chili, and black pepper” to give their drinks that edge.
But of course, all those ingredients have distinctive flavors of their own that might not make sense for the spirit in question. (Take it from me, you can't just soak some jalapeños in an agave syrup solution and get anywhere near tequila. It'll be hard to drink, but not for the right reasons.)
To be honest, I haven't found an NA spirit that's totally nailed it, of either the standard-stand-in or doing-its-own-thing varieties. Whoever does will have free access to my wallet.
Zero-proof drinks: still new, still small
And someone probably will nail it. McMillan reminds me just how new this industry is.
"We're only a few years into this," he says. "The history of beer is thousands of years old. The same thing goes for the liquor equivalents. The solution to this is nothing glamorous. It's time. It's new. People are bad at it because it's the beginning."
The immaturity and small scale of the NA industry is, of course, another factor behind its prices. Like many startup craft brewers of both the alcoholic and non-alcoholic varieties, Heck is contracting with an existing brewery to make its beer while it gets its own premises sorted out.
"A lot of new non-alcoholic products, which is basically everything at the moment," McMillan says, "they're all co-packing with someone. They're paying someone to make it for them, which is an order of magnitude more expensive than making it yourself. And because you need to scale to the point where you could justify leasing a building, buying equipment, having production staff."
When a minus becomes a plus
All that said, at both Suckerpunch and Heck, McMillan hasn't gotten as much guff about Heck's prices as online kvetching might lead you to expect. "We're not finding any real consumer pushback to charging as much as you would for a craft beer," he says, "because it tastes like a regular beer. It's good. And in fact, actually, it's a bonus. We took out the only part of beer that is bad, which is the poison they put in it. Like literally, there's a thing in there that attacks your body and makes you feel like trash."
That's why, to me, "why are non-alcoholic drinks so expensive?" is the wrong question. The more germane, interesting one is "why did I expect non-alcoholic ones to be cheaper?" We're used to alcohol costing more than other drinks, but the booze is an almost free byproduct of all the other work and care and time that go into their production.
The same work, or even more, goes into non-alcoholic alternatives so I can still have those moments without the regrets and hangovers. Why would they be cheaper? Now that I think of drinking zero-proof as not only the same experience, but a better experience, the price parity makes perfect sense. I would have paid a lot of money to not feel like shit during chemo, too.
"Could we have everything about beer," McMillan says, "everything about the flavors of beer that don't exist anywhere else, everything about the experience of cracking a beer at five o'clock on a Friday and enjoying it at the end of a long work week, and being able to drink something cold and crisp and refreshing on a hot day when you're floating down a river or whatever… can we have all of that but without the problems of beer?
"And it turns out, yes, we can."
Huh, there's a whole other industry I apparently knew nothing about. Have you ventured into the world of non-alcoholic drinks? Got any favorites, or tips for anyone wanting to, ahem, give it a shot? Join us for this week's Shoddy Goods forum chat.
- Dave (and the rest of Meh)
Oh, and if you're new to Shoddy Goods, check out our past issues:
The biggest, weirdest advertising flop in Olympics history
Does Temu creep you out? It’s worse than you think
The new vinylists
From a King to a Jack