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Comment by Steve44 | Hacker News Reader

One aspect which is often not considered with alcohol is that it’s one of the few drugs where you’re not just taking it to experience its affect – to get drunk. There are so many fantastically variable tastes and mouth feels with drinks that for many the majority of the pleasure is actually in consuming them. Wines & beers are a pleasure to drink and can go extremely well with food, often adding another layer to the enjoyment of the meal. Sipping spirits and cocktails can be a fantastic sensory experience, there is a whole world of flavours to explore and enjoy.

The getting tipsy / drunk part is, of course, part of it and some people do go too far. It also has a lot of other problems but don’t lose sight that there is so much more to it than just getting drunk.

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I was gonna make a sarcastic remark about how O'Douls and other NA beer must be booming business if alcohol wasn't the main attraction...

https://www.brewbound.com/news/brewers-large-and-small-take-...

Joke's on me eh?

There is now quite a range of low/zero alcohol beers and they are getting more drinkable. Some of them can be fairly nice is small quantities but they all lack the depth of a good beer. I had an interesting one brewed with Kombucha recently, that was quite an interesting drink but still not as good as a real beer can be. Erdinger Alkoholfrei wheat beer is pretty good. https://wisebartender.co.uk/ has a really good range.

All the non alcoholic wines I’ve tried have been pretty bad, more like a sweet vermouth. Can be made drinkable with some tonic water.

There is also a boom in distilled non alcoholic 'spirits' which can be OK. Again they don't have the depths of a spirit and tend to be quite light with wither floral or spicy notes. They are also expensive, Seedlip is one of the better ones but at £26 a bottle it's comparable to a decent quality spirit.

It's great that there has been so much development but they're still quite different drinks.

People say the same about cofffe. Although I suspect 8 out of 10 times people just want the caffeine hit and should ingest via pill instead.

Yeah, I feel like it's a justification more than anything. I feel like people become prudes because they want something more to their desire for more alcohol/caffeine instead of the other way around.

For example, there are plenty of non-alcoholic, non-caffeinated beverages, but few with as much subtle variety as alcoholic/caffeinated beverages. For example:

- kefir - kombucha (though it's pretty trendy these days) - probiotic drinks

Each of those has some variety, but I can find far more variety in pretty much any category of spirits (beer, wine, cider, hard liquor, etc) and caffeinated drinks (coffee, tea). I can find maybe a dozen varieties of the above, whereas I can find at least a dozen subcategories of wine or coffee, with tons of variation within each subcategory.

I have a hard time believing that the main attraction for coffee and alcohol connoisseurs is taste/texture/etc and not the drug inside the beverage. In other words, if the drug had no effect on humans, would there be a similar level of interest?

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