Here we are one week into the new year. By now, all those New Year’s Eve endcap displays of sparkling wine in every supermarket anywhere have been replaced by nonalcoholic beer displays. In days gone by, that was your only no-alcohol New Year’s resolution option outside of soft drinks and the like. But if you craved that ritual and that taste that often only alcohol provides, you were limited to beverages that looked sort of like beer, came in beer bottles and often even had Germanic-sounding names, but tasted nothing like beer.
Here in America, we like taste — big taste. And alcohol certainly delivers that. It’s one of the reasons why our wine, our liquor and our beer have more alcohol on average than anywhere else. And it’s hard to replace that element — hard but not impossible.
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With the overall downturn in drinking on an international level, it becomes evident that drinking “better” is the new normal. What was it James Bond once said?
“I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold, and very well made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad,” Ian Fleming wrote in 1953’s “Casino Royale.”
And if it was true for Bond, can’t it also be true for nonalcoholic secret agents? Aside from the “strong” part, why can’t it still be very large, very cold and very well made?
Well, it can. Luckily for us, many producers are leading the charge in that direction. You can now find nonalcoholic Italian sparkling wine, nonalcoholic IPA beers and nonalcoholic amaro. Even Guinness makes a delicious 0.0 version of their legendary stout. In addition, there are a whole bevy of prepackaged nonalcoholic cocktails — negronis, spritzes, “agave” drinks, etc. — now available, and many of them are exceptionally fine. And, doubly luckily for us, our local producers are leading the nonalcoholic way.
Here are my three current favorites, fresh for the new year and beyond.
• Free Spirits’ Spirit of Milano, nonalcoholic “amaro,” $33.98
Marin’s Milan Martin and his company Free Spirits really hit a home run with this one. Amaro means “bitter” in Italian, but amaros are classified as alcohol, whereas “flavoring” or “cocktail” bitters are classified as food. Both can be alcoholic. Bitters are the gray area. Some have alcohol — as much as 90 proof — and some don’t. Often, it’s hard to tell and you really need to read the fine print. So, somewhat ironically, Martin skips the naming controversy and calls his product something different: “The Spirit of Milano.” But, you know what? The Spirit of Milano tastes like amaro — and not nonalcoholic amaro, but real quality Italian amaro. Lightly bittersweet, with hints of rhubarb and spice — much like Aperol — it’s delicious on its own as a purely nonalcoholic component, or even in conjunction with actual full-proof alcohol for a lower-proof option. And who doesn’t like a good pun when it comes to names?
More information at drinkfreespirits.com.
• Best Day Brewing’s nonalcoholic beers, six 12-ounce beers for $13.99
Sausalito’s Best Day Brewing produces five nonalcoholic beers in five recognizable categories in craft brewing. From lightest to heaviest, they are: Electro-Lime, which is reminiscent of a Mexican lager with lime and salt, their “kolsch-style” beer emulating the lightly hoppy, top-fermented beers of Cologne, flavored with pilsner malt, a full-bodied West Coast IPA, a lighter-bodied Hazy IPA and even an enormously full-bodied “imperial” IPA called Galaxy Ripple. Remember that nonalcoholic beers fit into two categories: less than 0.5% ABV, and less than 0.0% ABV. The differences in law are subtle and you must read the labels closely as there is almost no discernible difference on the labeling except for the small print. Best Day’s beers fit into the under 0.5% category, but certainly sit well in the craft brewing category as well. They even offer a variety pack.
More information at Bestdaybrewing.com.
• H2o Sonoma Soft Seltzer, 0.0% Sparkling Rosé, 12 cans for $54.98
We have to go all the way to the city of Sonoma to add our nonalcoholic wine component. For a very long time, much de-alcoholized wine has been of very low quality. There have also been attempts at making premium grape juices out of wine varietals with limited success. Again, alcohol is a hard flavor component to replace. But H2o’s “wine-infused” sparkling waters — isn’t legal jargon fun? — might just have figured out a way to mitigate both the flatness of nonalcoholic still wine and the sweetness of premium grape juices.
“Come quickly, I am tasting stars,” is the quote often attributed to Dom Pérignon, the so-called “inventor” of sparkling wine. And Sonoma’s H2o might have also just made that discovery, too, because their new product is a sparkling rosé. Acidically effervescent, this bright-pink bubbly quite literally tickles the palate. The 0.0% ABV product is mostly mineralized sparkling water with added pinot noir grape juice concentrate, and de-alcoholized wine. It’s that last component that really gives this rosé the palate-cleansing mouthfeel of a really dry sparkling rosé wine — think French — while the grape juice gives it that great strawberry-ish depth of flavor. It’s pink. It’s celebratory. And it’s nonalcoholic. What more could you want?
More information at h2oseltzer.com.
Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com