It’s the day after Christmas, and I’ve dragged my fiancée, sister, and brother-in-law to the Dream House Lounge, one of a few “sober” bars in New Orleans. We order a round: two spiritless Palomas, one nonalcoholic IPA, and for me, a “Dreamarita” (their take on the classic margarita, made with zero-proof BARE Tequila and AVEC Yuzu & Lime). We clink our cups together and I take a sip. It’s sweet. It doesn’t have that typical tequila bite. And it reminds me that I don’t hate many things, but nonalcoholic beverages are one of them.
In the three years since I quit drinking, NA options have expanded well beyond O’Doul’s. Trendy distilleries like Seedlip are selling zero-proof spirits made of herbs, spices, peels, and barks. Breweries like Athletic Brewing Company are pumping out NA craft beers at unprecedented rates. NA bars and bottle shops like SIPPLE, Awake, and the aforementioned Dream House Lounge have popped up all over the country. Even Katy Perry has her own line of NA apéritifs.
How well these drinks actually replicate alcohol varies. The general consensus is that the latest NA beers and wines taste almost identical to their boozy counterparts, while NA spirits are more complicated. Some are just meant to add fruity or floral notes to your mocktails—the Dream House Lounge Paloma, for example, tastes more like apple juice than tequila. But other NA spirits really do capture the bitter bite of hard alcohol. You can even get your hands on NA bitters, if you’re into that.
All of this is to quench the thirst of the swelling “sober-curious” movement—a growing number of people making an effort to not drink. Interestingly, it’s mostly young people who are doing this—compared to 20 years ago, the number of college-aged Americans who abstain from alcohol is up from 20 to 28 percent. Much like how millennials “killed” napkins, Hooters, and cereal, Gen Z is putting an end to getting plastered, and alcohol has decidedly “lost its cool.” As a result, low- and no-alcohol beverage sales are projected to increase by 31 percent by 2024, and brands like Seedlip are “on a mission to change the way the world drinks,” one Dry January sale at a time.
But with every new nonalcoholic option, my vendetta against them grows stronger.
Before I explain why, you should know that I love alcohol. In fact, I love alcohol so much that, like 1 in 8 Americans, I drank enough of it to qualify as having an alcohol use disorder. But because of my past relationship with alcohol—and my current one with sobriety—drinking NA drinks feels kind of like hooking up with an ex; it’s not what it used to be, and once your “cup” is empty, all that’s left is guilt.
This can be a confusing experience for sober people. The smell and taste of booze, including NA alternatives—as well as being in barlike environments—can send your brain into relapse mode. This is especially detrimental to anyone with a substance use disorder because the odds are already stacked against them: Data shows that relapse rates sit between 40 and 60 percent. Not to mention, one study of 45 NA beverages found that many have more alcohol in them than they let on (up to 1.8 percent ABV, in some cases.)
This is why San Francisco resident Alex Casey, who’s been sober for two and half years, avoids NA drinks altogether. “If I’m cracking open a Heineken 0.0, my dopamine receptors are firing,” he tells me. “You pop the cap off. You get a whiff of hops. That can be very triggering.”
Despite this, the NA industry’s target market is people who have quit or want to quit drinking. People who drink heavily (daily or multiple times per week) are statistically more sober-curious than people who have their drinking under control, suggesting that frequent drinking feeds the urge to live an alcohol-free lifestyle. And for these heavy drinkers, NA beverages are sold as a stopgap, a literal stand-in for alcohol.
To this point, it’s worth noting that America is split between nondrinkers, moderate drinkers, and extremely heavy drinkers. It’s been reported that 30 percent of American adults don’t drink, 30 percent drink less than one drink per week, and 10 percent drink a whopping 74 drinks every week. That means 10 percent of American adults account for nearly 60 percent of alcohol sales.
In other words, the market for NA beverages—people who drink heavily and are looking for an alternative—is likely made up of the kinds of people who should be watching out for triggers, not the ones who are having less than one boozy drink per week. (Data also shows that NA drinks are generally unpopular, but may appeal to people who are craving alcohol but trying not to drink.)
I’ll save my “capitalism sucks” spiel for another time, but it rubs me the wrong way that the NA industry is profiting off of addiction, or at least the urge to drink alcohol (the global market for NA drinks was valued at $1.29 trillion in 2021 and is expected to increase.) Much like how e-cigarettes are marketed as the lesser evil for cigarette smokers and how diet sodas are sold as the (arguably) “healthier” alternative to sugary ones, makers of NA drinks are banking on the personal and societal craving to drink something that at least resembles alcohol.
NA drinks aren’t any cheaper than their alcoholic counterparts, either. My Dreamarita cost $12. A bottle of Sovi nonalcoholic wine goes for $38. A bottle of Seedlip will run you $32. In fact, according to data gathered by the alcohol e-commerce platform Drizly, the cost of NA spirits is actually higher than alcoholic ones. The alleged justification for this is that the process of making NA beverages is as arduous, if not more so, than making real alcohol. But it could also be that people trying to stop drinking are simply so desperate for an alternative that they’re willing to pay a premium for fake booze.
Whether you’re drinking alcohol or NA drinks, that money often goes into the same pockets, too. Alcohol giant Diageo, owner of Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker, and Guinness, owns a majority share in Seedlip. Anheuser-Busch, which has a hand in pretty much every beer you can think of, has been shifting their efforts and investments toward NA beers year after year.
If I were being extra pessimistic—and maybe even a bit conspiratorial—I’d suggest that NA drink manufacturers are hoping that people find themselves in an endless cycle of drinking alcohol, drinking NA drinks, falling off the wagon, and doing it all over again. At the very least, it seems that they want people to stay close to the culture of drinking. This sort of scheme has been done before by the tobacco industry: Altria, the parent company of Marlboro, invested billions into Juul, presumably hoping to cash in on addictions of their own making.
That said, addiction is a very personal experience, and it can’t all be pinned on external forces like marketing or corporate profits. “I can’t blame capitalism entirely for my need to toe the line with destructive behaviors,” explains Loz McQ, who runs the @brutalrecovery meme page, has been sober for five years, and typically avoids NA drinks. “I’m an addict to my core. But I’m an addict living in a capitalist hellscape, which doesn’t help.”
Wouldn’t we all fare better if this capitalist hellscape didn’t bombard us with an alternative the second we ditched our original vice? It’s possible. “If vapes and Diet Coke didn’t exist, I’d probably have just accepted not having soda and cigarettes in my life anymore,” she continues.
But it’s also possible that we’re past the point of no return, that addiction is inevitable, and that these less damaging alternatives serve as harm reduction tools for the greater good. There are, in fact, multiple studies that suggest having more NA options out there may curb drinking within society at large (though the research “needs considerable expansion.”)
It’s also true that some people have successfully used NA drinks to wean themselves off alcohol. Los Angeles resident (and my aforementioned brother-in-law) Collin Citron, who quit drinking one year ago, managed to replace his end-of-the-workday beers with nonalcoholic Budweiser Zeros and Old Milwaukees, which he says accurately replicate the “bad” beers he once loved. He works in the music industry and has been known to sip on NA beers at shows to experience “the muscle memory of holding a cold can while watching a rock band play.”
Now that he has 12 months of sobriety under his belt, Citron doesn’t see himself drinking as many NA beers going forward, but he’s still grateful for them: “They definitely helped me stop drinking regular beers, so I’m glad they exist,” he tells me, softening my hardened stance ever so slightly.
It’s this conversation, after my Dreamarita and Citron’s nonalcoholic IPA, that helps me realize something: While my feud with NA beverages is valid—and there’s no denying that the culture and marketing of drinking contribute to overdrinking—the best we can do is know ourselves and be mindful of our consumption. It’s important that we understand why we drink, or at least pretend to drink, in order to stop, even if that means navigating a world where someone’s always trying to cash in on our worst impulses.
If NA drinks work for you, cool—sobriety is sobriety, regardless of how you get there. But for me, a guy who packed a lifetime’s worth of alcohol into his early 20s, I’m just better off sticking to drinks that aren’t masquerading as alcohol. I like LaCroix. On special occasions, I’ll have Martinelli’s. And if I’m feeling especially bad about myself, I’ll go for a cherry Coke.
They might not be as lavish as a Dreamarita, but they’re good enough for me.
