No Buzz Booze: The History and Science of Going Low- or No-Alcohol

Gastropod

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Science, Food, History, Arts

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dry January may be over, but, for many people, drinking less alcohol or none at all is an increasingly common choice year-round. And, unlike in the past, when dealcoholized options were few and far between—and had a well-deserved reputation for tasting bad—there’s now a booming market for non-alcoholic beers, wines, canned cocktails, and even spirits for the so-called "sober curious." But how do they get the booze out of our favorite tipples—and why is hard to keep the flavor? Gastropod is here to investigate! Join us for the history of breakfast beer, worker’s wine, and Welch’s Prohibition-era roots, as well as the science behind the “spinning cone” technology that revolutionized the world of non-alcoholic beverages. Plus: our hosts and a few brave volunteers put their taste buds on the line to find out which of these new drinks is worth swapping for the hard stuff, and which they wish they'd left on the shelf. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I have literally never had non-alcoholic beer before.
0:06.0	I have some last night, so I'm much more up on it.
0:09.0	I'm Jeff Mayno, and yeah, this is actually the first night to my knowledge that I will be tasting non-alcoholic beer.
0:16.0	Hi, I'm Rose Kranz Baldwin, and I don't have much for a relationship with non-alcoholic beverages. I've had an
0:22.8	athletic beer before. I just wanted to sample the landscape and I came away really unimpressed.
0:29.4	We have beer, wine, cocktails, and a booze that I think is going to be pretty bad. Sorry, booze.
0:33.7	All right. So we have some low expectations, which is always the way I like to start things.
0:39.4	You know it's going to be a fun night when Nikki and I are both pretty sure that things are going to taste bad, and we rope our friends into the whole experience.
0:46.4	It's the price you pay for being married to or friends with a gastropod co-host.
0:51.8	This is, of course, Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the
0:55.0	lens of science and history. I'm Nicola Twilly. And I'm Cynthia Graber. And this episode was
0:59.2	inspired by an email that came through the normal email route to our contact at gastropod.com email,
1:04.6	and it was from a generous supporter of the show. But I must admit, he happens to also be a close friend. I'm Jeremy Rothman-Shore. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have been listening to
1:14.5	Gastropods since the very first episode. I still remember about the golden spoon.
1:18.5	Jeremy is an OG fan, and I love it. But this episode, he's all business because he has a
1:24.6	question that only gastropod can answer. So over the last year, I've developed a real taste for non-alcoholic beer,
1:31.1	and it kind of got me wondering, how do they make it?
1:34.9	Do they make it like regular beer, and then they take the alcohol out,
1:39.4	or do they have some way of brewing the taste of beer without alcohol?
1:43.6	It kind of baffled me.
1:45.4	And so that's why I wanted to know.
1:46.5	When we heard this, we realized we had no clue how on earth they make non-alcoholic drinks, too.
	...

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