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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

> In the future, people who take the gel could reduce the harmful and intoxicating effects of alcohol.

I understand harm reduction but what is the point of reducing the intoxicating effects of alcohol? What's the point?

Alcohol is a solvent for many flavours. That's why you have a lot of it in perfumes, and that's why alcohol-free drinks don't taste as good as the originals. In Europe, we drink a lot of alcohol with food exactly for that reason (wine dissolves the fats of the sauce or just the meat and mixes and enhances the taste).

I'd really like to enjoy it without any drunkenness afterwards nor any effect on my health.

Yeah, if there was a product that would let me enjoy real wine but the effect of the alcohol would be similar to a 3% mild beer, I would use that fairly often. A typical wine at 11-12% is a bit too strong for many situations.

From alcohol, I love:

- drinking it: I really enjoy the feeling of just ingesting beer, wine or spirits, especially with friends or family

- having a nice buzz from it.

However, those two things are, for me, incompatible. If I start drinking a little bit, I usually don't stop until I'm way beyond the "nice buzz". As the joke goes, "one beer is not enough, two beers are just enough, three beers really aren't enough".

Having something that would allow me to keep drinking without jeopardizing my body, my mind, and the day after would be a huge game changer.

Sounds like maybe the "alcohol free"/"0.0%" beer (not really 100% alcohol free) is something you should try. Tastes and looks like beer, but doesn't come with the buzz (which is the thing that your brain hooks into and uses to tell you it isn't enough yet).

> Tastes and looks like beer

I have tried almost every major non-alcoholic beer in the U.S., and none of them truly taste exactly like beer.

There’s a brand I’ve seen in stores called “Athletic” and it’s nearly indistinguishable

Over in the UK I think Adnams Ghost Ship 0.5% is the best one commonly available that I’ve had. Most of them are far too sweet.

They are improving all the time.

Some are really good. If you like german weissbeer then Franziskaner Alkoholfrei is more or less indistiguishable to me.

There are other good ones too.

> I have tried almost every major non-alcoholic beer in the U.S., and none of them truly taste exactly like beer.

Agreed, but if you drink them exclusively for a few weeks, your taste buds and brain will reframe around them, and it'll cease to be a problem. I did this with Brewdog's Punk AF, and after 2 weeks on that, most non-alcoholic beers triggered my brain's "I'm drinking beer!" response.

It's a lot of work for overpriced soft drinks, and isn't for everyone.

Also, I'm back to drinking real beer again anyway.

Microdosing psilocybin (shrooms) is amazing at letting me go out and just have 1-2 beers while still giving the slight affect of a nice anxiety-free buzz. I'm what I'd call a nervous drinker. I'm ADHD and sitting still can be rough for me, so at bars I tend to drink a lot very fast because the only fidgeting I can do without looking strange is .. cup to face over and over.

Obviously not something everyone wants to do or can do, it's legal for me, but it's great for basically taking my interest in alcohol away after a beer or two. Microdosing is usually 1/10th or less what a "normal" light dose would be (going with 1-2g dose here, so 0.1/0.2). No weird/visual/hallucination effects or anything like that.

You just feel a bit lighter and relaxed. Been a big game changer for me since I go out all the time. A bunch of my service industry friends and I do it and they've all started drinking significantly less.

Naltrexone is great too but it's probably easier to get someone to microdose than ask their doctor for that which is unfortunate. You won't get a buzz with that, you'll just get bored of drinking by your 2nd beer and move on to doing other things which can also be nice at times.

Try alternating between water and beer. You’ll drink half as much, and at a better pace.

There's many occasions where I don't want to drink, but not doing so can make things uncomfortable. It's unfortunate, but there's lots of occasions where abstaining can make other people uncomfortable, or cause them to give you a hard time, or any number of other things. I would love to be able to take something that allows me drink but with none of the side effects, just to avoid potential uncomfortable situations. Again, I'm not condoning the behavior and it's unfortunate that this is how society is sometimes. But it would be nice to have this option.

There's also people who have difficulty controlling their drinking once they start. This would certainly help in those scenarios.

Another example is a situation where a woman may be pregnant so doesn't want to drink, but may not be far enough along that she wants people to know. Not drinking would get people wondering, but drinking could harm the fetus. I don't know if this gel would make drinking safe in that scenario - but if it does, that would be a great situation to use it in.

If people are uncomfortable with you not drinking, that's very much on them

Agreed. And ideally that shouldn't matter. But in the real world there are other consequences and side effects. Maybe I don't want to make them uncomfortable. Maybe I just don't want to deal with the nagging, "busting my chops", or the questions about why I'm not drinking. Maybe I want to avoid some preconceived notions certain people may have about people who don't drink. So even if it's on them, there are still personal reasons I may want to avoid the situation.

People will take their cue from you as to how to respond. If you act embarrassed about it, they’ll react accordingly. If it’s no big deal to you, same thing for them.

I quit cold turkey years ago. I was worried about the same things. But even my most macho & hard-drinking friends just accepted it without comment.

I encountered a lot of peer pressure to drink when I was in college. (I didn't drink much because a lot of alcohol makes my stomach upset.)

Don't surround yourself with people who make you uncomfortable. It's a lesson I realized as I got older: It has little to do with drinking; but if the people around you make you feel uncomfortable not drinking, then you're around the wrong people.

> Don't surround yourself with people who make you uncomfortable.

I wish I learnt this at age 0. This goes for online life as well.

Stop giving in to peer pressure. You'll be happier.

Club soda with lime. No one knows there's not vodka in it but you.

Club soda and bitters has been a recent goto

> There's many occasions where I don't want to drink, but not doing so can make things uncomfortable.

People don't care as much if/what others drink as you think.

The hardest part of reducing my alcohol consumption is that I love red wine so much. The flavor, the aroma, the acidity, everything. I have stopped drinking all alcohol except red wine because of the health effects. I would be delighted to have a way to drink wine without any intoxication.

Red wine being healthy is a myth.

But misunderstood, see below…

GP is saying they have stopped drinking most alcohol (all except red wine) because of the [negative] health effects.

It has health benefits. The alcohol in it is no better for you than any other alcohol.

I know red wine is just as bad for me as any other alcohol, which is to say quite bad, and in any dose. I meant I've largely quit because of that. But I just can't quit you, Red Wine.

Non-alcoholic beer sales are close to $40B/year globally and going up. Generally speaking, the flavor of non-alcoholic beer pales in comparison to the real thing.

Then there's also the market for wine and spirits.

There are some new, very good, NA beers on the market these days. Untitled Art and Athletic are two brands that are doing great work.

Yes, those both make some good NA beers. I wouldn't categorize them as good beers, but they are drinkable.

Yes, those are great for NA beers (De Halve Maan's Brugse Sportzot is better). Unfortunately, they're mediocre among normal beers.

The Athletic seasonals are way better than their "always available." And the Free Wave is better than the Run Wild for the always available beers. They had an Irish Stout (Emerald Coast) that was indistinguishable. I could have blind taste tested them. There's some fantastic single-hop beers too.

I couldn't get into the Untitled Art. Just too sweet.

> Generally speaking, the flavor of non-alcoholic beer pales in comparison to the real thing.

Ehhh... that's a bit of an overstatement, though I mostly agree.

I just happened to be doing a crapload of bar hopping this last month and got into trying different non-alcoholic beers because they're way more prevalent than they used to be.

They're certainly a lot better than the nonalcoholic beers of yore. And it's also obvious that you're not drinking a traditional beer. Undoubtedly, it has to do with the lack of ethanol present, but I can't help but think it's got to do with the process of producing them. Nonalcoholic beers, from what I've noticed, are usually much less foamy than alcoholic beer.

I will generally still drink alcoholic beer since I don't seem to have alcoholism in me, but I think it's great that people are being given options. When I was younger, I really hated it when people would pressure me to drink or act like I'm an alien for not wanting to drink, and nonalcoholic beer is inconspicuous enough that people can drink socially without the peculiar attitude. Although that attitude seems to have largely gone away anyway.

There's this Danish startup that claims they can put the missing flavour back into the beer using their enzymes:

https://evodiabio.com/yops/ https://science.ku.dk/english/press/news/2022/researchers-ma...

Why drink grain juice when you could drink fruit juice?

I like really strong drinks like overproof whiskey and IPAs and craft cocktails, which can be shockingly alcoholic sometimes. It would be nice to have essentially a higher alcohol tolerance so I could drink the drinks I like most more freely. Now, I usually just eat a huge meal before I drink a lot, but a pill would be much better.

Take this gel at the end of the night so that you don't have a hangover the next day?

Almost any social drinking setting is going to have some people drink more than they're comfortable with. Having some way to mitigate the effects is wonderful.

Intoxicating. If you get the root of that word you might figure out the answer.

To drive home? =)

I would love a supplement with that effect. It's not always fun having to slowly sober up while watching your friends drinking.

To enjoy consuming alcoholic drinks without being intoxicated?

It's great for spies. As I've learned from movies, it's important for them to hold their booze better than their sources.

Yeah people who want that could just drink beer with a low alcohol content (so called "alcohol-free beer", which usually still has some 0.5%)

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