What makes a great mocktail? (2018) | Hacker News Reader

What makes a great mocktail? (2018)

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74 pointsamarcheschi81 comments

I gave up drinking 5 years ago. Just didn't want it in my life anymore. Started just feeling ick more often than not even with just a couple drinks. Just stopped feeling worth it. But I loved cocktails.

So we've been experimenting with a ton of things. By far the most fun one is this: https://weareraisingthebar.com/

It's pricey, but they expose me to all the new non-alcohol things out there. It's great if you just want an easy way to get fun new things without thinking too hard about this category.

Also, our very own Justin Kan, is a founder of Woody's Wine (NA): https://woodys.wine

So many good NA beers now. Athletic, Guinness, Heineken, all play well here.

Still looking for a good fake bourbon. My favorite so far is Free Sprits https://drinkfreespirits.com/collections/non-alcoholic-spiri... Fair warning though. None of these fake alcohols drink well on their own. I don't think anyone has a bourbon anyone is going to like on the rocks or neat. But it does well in mocktails.

In that case, may I recommend a completely ... different type of experience?

https://www.adagio.com/

Before you engage, you can have in your head this 3 second clip on YouTube that I uploaded a decade ago :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeUARKgSWJw

Oh, that store sells samples for a small price, that's kinda cool, I'm probably gonna try some of their teas

Adagio is not really that great, take a look at the r/tea wiki for better options [0].

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/tea/wiki/vendors/page_01

Perhaps you might enjoy making cocktail yourselves :D

There is /r/Mocktails, imbibe magazine has a alcohol free section with a lot of recipes, and there are books as well - I'd suggest good drinks by Julia Bainbridge and Zero by alinea group-.

Here are a few recipes that Julia Bainbridge posted online: https://tastecooking.com/author/juliabainbridge/

The nyc special and the change of address are pretty nice imho

My biggest pain point is that there is no high end past Zero. The Julia book is solid.

In actual cocktails, there are a handful of books that are _incredible_ and cater to high end cocktails. I have ~600 bottles at home (I know...) and I really appreciate those books. I'm willing to make cranberry tequila rosemary ice. Or clarify a punch.

Almost every mocktail resource is... quite frankly... too simple. "Add lemon to fake sparking wine to make a delicious French 75!"

This makes sense from sheer numbers. Way less folks making mocktails. I love that Alinea book. Just wish there were good websites out there.

I've started doing spirit free cocktails recently, but I definitely get that there are way less resources than regular cocktails. However, zero has a section on making backbar alcohols such that you might be able to use them on regular cocktails, by substituting the alcohol with their spirit free version. The taste won't be the same of course, and you might have to alter the dosage, but it's better than nothing. Perhaps you won't be able to clarify an alcohol free wine, but I'm sure there are recipes that aren't ruined by replacing alcohol with its non alcoholic version

I highly recommend trying to make some homemade ginger beer. It’s super easy, takes just a few days to ferment, lots of recipes online. Much better than the stuff in the store which is filled with added sugar or artificial sweeteners. Plus you can brew with extra ginger if you like it strong. Whatever you do, don’t ferment it in glass bottles. Use 2 liter plastic soda bottles.

> Whatever you do, don’t ferment it in glass bottles

Any particular reason not to simply get a glass fermentation jar? I try to minimize plastic use, and I swear things taste better out of glass.

most of the time folks are fermenting ginger beer, it's just to carbonate it. ginger beer isn't usually fermented to produce alcohol like a normal beer.

since there is so much sugar available in ginger beer, fermenting/carbonating it in sealed glass bottles will result in bottle bombs.

skip the fermentation completely: 2 liter plastic soda bottles are great for force-carbonating with a co2 tank. if you really don't like plastic you could find a 1 gallon stainless steel keg and carbonate (and serve) from that.

Probably pointing at exploding bottles; I've made probably 40 batches of ginger beer and when I would 'burp' the bottles I never had an issue. Decided once to try out not doing so and had six hours of clean up. But otherwise you're probably fine. Just let out carbonation morning and night, it takes a minute or so.

As someone who boils his own ginger to make ginger shots, I am very intrigued! Any advice? I never fermented anything(knowingly) before!

You don't have to ferment it to get a rich flavor. You just have to use fresh ginger instead of dried or powdered. We make it with Fresh Ginger, Lemon juice, orange juice, cane sugar and molasses. Then force carb.

I use fresh ginger. I’m just curious on how to make ginger alcohol

You can definitely make ginger beer with wild yeast (fresh ginger root conveniently comes with lots of wild yeasts) and make delicious drinks. There are lots of recipes.

I also recommend, if anyone is interested, investigating “ginger beer plant” (GBP), which is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeasts (SCOBY) such as that used to brew kombucha and kefir. It was once common in Britain, but almost went extinct. Some was saved by a German culture bank (DSMZ), and now you can buy some online! Makes a different, and I think delicious, drink compared to the “ginger bug” method!

I have found kombucha to be unreasonably good at adding an interesting mouthfeel to cocktails. It's reminiscent of alcohol, but definitely not a perfect imitation. Grapefruit juice is also a regular ingredient of mine.

Agreed.

Grapefruit has a flavor kick for sure, but I would strongly advise against putting it into cocktails, at least without being very upfront and clear about it. Grapefruit has very strong interactions with such a large number of drugs, that even just the interactions themselves have a separate page on Wikipedia [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapefruit%E2%80%93drug_intera...

> mouthfeel

This word is so gross I find any foods described using it as immediately and viscerally less palatable.

I love kombucha, but my sense memory did a gross little convolution for a second.

The concept of this word is important and otherwise hard to convey, but it's such a weird word.

On the subject of words, I was really expecting "convulsion" rather than "convolution" there.

You can just call it "texture," but it's a fun term d'art.

As with "automatic memory collection" for those grossed out by "garbage collection."

Typical commercial kombucha is about 0.5% ABV. Not exactly not alcohol.

A lot of "NA" beers are also 0.5%. Incidentally, freshly baked bread is also often around 0.5% depending on the type of bread, as are very ripe bananas.

If you want a not-really-beer that's trivially easy to make at home, I suggest kalja

Just mash 100% dark rye (weyermanns chocolate rye) for.... some arbitrary time period (hours, and you don't even really need to keep temp up), maybe with some sugar for speed, and then ferment for... days (? 2 days? whatever), strain, and bottle (if you don't care about carbonation, just use mason jars), and stick it into the fridge for another couple days.

It's anywhere between 0.1-0.7% ABV depending on temperature, length of fermentation, etc.

Bonus, compared to kombucha, it doesn't look like some alien growth thing while fermenting

> 5%. Incidentally, freshly baked bread is also often around 0.5% depending on the type of bread, as are very ripe bananas.

I’ve heard this before, but how can it be true? Bread is baked at a high temperature, I do it as 250C, but would go higher if I could. My father bakes at 500-600 degrees. How would alcohol stay in the bread? Or is the measure taken pre baking?

This makes sense to me. Most of the water leaves as vapor too.

I guess it is contained and cannot leave easily. Water also stays in the bread as water vapor, so it is not completely dry after baking.

"Does the booze really cook off?"

No, not all of it. Even a long-cooking stew can have 5% of the alcohol that was added at the start.

https://www.isu.edu/news/2019-fall/no-worries-the-alcohol-bu...

And, somehow, the smell of my mom's fresh-baked bread ties in with my adult sense of the odor of alcohol to say--yeah, there was some alcohol there, even if a small amount.

Angostura bitters are seriously magical. They improve everything. A few dashes are basically non-alcoholic, too.

The best mocktail, which even a grown man can enjoy without feeling silly, is as simple as bitters + tonic.

It really is great, and something that can be ordered at just about any bar anywhere. Excellent as a stand-in between alcoholic beverages to avoid getting too plastered, or if rolling completely alcohol-free, enough to feed the oral fixation that comes with being in any typical drinking situation.

The book Zero by alinea has recipes for spirit free bitters as well,I'm sure you can find similar recipes online for free

I bought just now some liquid smoke and I wanna try it so much for spirit free whiskey

Liquid smoke is a poor substitute for smoke in food I can't imagine mixing it for effect in a drink. For humans?

They sell little bits of pre-charred and corrugated wood that you can put in "crappy whisky to make it taste fancy", which is what I'd use, except I'd use a bernzomatic and a piece of oak from my yard.

I bet lump charcoal would work, too, if you had a filter stage afterward.

I've never tried it, so it might suck. If it does, I'll just use it for food and buy toasted oak chips

Mocktails taught me what an _incredible_ solvent alcohol is. It's hard to replicate alcohol for flavor extraction. Luckily, the mocktails I'm making are fine to have a tiny amount of alcohol (my wife just doesn't drink, but it's not religious or health related). Bitters make things so much easier.

When I realized that drinking a cocktail every night wasn't great for my health, I found the bitters + soda to be a great substitute. A shot of apple cider vinegar can add a bit of complexity to it as well.

Bitters and soda is a cocktail, though. I guess the poison is in the dose.

IMHO Angostura bitters have specific applications where they excel but are far from universally great. Their serious astringency and bitterness really step on other ingredients depending on the cocktail. I keep the following on hand (despite having retired my home bar a few years back):

  - Fee Brothers Old Fashioned
  - Fee Brothers Aztec Chocolate
  - Fee Brothers Grapefruit
  - Bittermens Hellfire Habanero Shrub
  - Peychaud's
  - Urban Moonshine Original

As far as NA beverages go I like making spiced chocolate sodas, grapefruit tonics, pink lemonade (via Peychaud's), and just bitters and soda with these. The only thing I'm missing is a good orange bitter as I find the Fee Brothers one to be too aggressive.

I feel like if someone could figure out an "alcohol" that doesn't metabolize like alcohol or kill you will be a somethingillionarire. Or at least a beverage/food company another mountain of money.

Like discovering fake sweeteners.

You mean the same inebriation effects but without the same health risks?

I believe there are drugs that act on similar receptors, and are not as toxic or at least don't need to be taken in such high doses for the same effect.

My understanding is that the drug GHB has very similar effects to alcohol, in lower doses, but unfortunately in higher doses is used as a date rape drug.

Alcohol has the benefit of being somewhat naturally occurring. I don't see many other recreational drugs being legalized or so widely used.

Ah. no. sorry. i meant really just tastes like alcohol. but no inebriation or health effects. I really like the taste of alcohol in a drink, but don't want any of the effects.

Ah OK, I often thought the opposite, that people mainly drink for the sugar in beer etc, as well as the alcohol. But I always felt like the kick of the alcohol was just something people came to like as it preceeds the effect.

Otherwise more people might drink vodka and water.

"Kava" is supposed to mimic a drunk, in the way that Kratom mimics opiates and kanna mimics MDMA.

I only know that if you're not careful with kratom it will hurt you thru the exact same mechanisms that opiates do. No idea about dosing or anything on kava or kanna. I tried kanna but only low micro doses. It is like a slight mood elevator at low dosages, like I imagine "a beer with dinner" elevates mood slightly.

2.5 grams of kratom feels exactly like an oxy, down to wanting to tell everyone you really love them and is that shirt felt well it is now

Kratom is definitely something to be wary of. Physical withdrawals similar to opiates with prolonged use and made up of alkaloids we don't know the full safety profile of yet (or at least didn't when it was taking off in popularity.) I would not be surprised to find out morphine is "healthier" for the body. Plus there was that scare around some of the big kratom distributers having batches of the leaves contaminated with heavy metals like lead in products they continued to sell.

Would highly advise people to steer clear of it if not using it for harm reduction though the wisdom of replacing one physically addictive drug with another doesn't seem to bode well either. Not a doctor just my two cents.

okay now do tea

edit: here i'll start

Tea is made from the leaves of trees which leech fluoride into the leaf from the groundwater where it is grown. Cessation of tea ingestion can lead to withdrawals and severe mood changes. Tea has been the proximate cause of at least one major war, but since it was about tea, it was a very civil war.

Kind of a silly comparison. Much of kratom's popularity came about because the alternative is illegal not because of how safe it is or isn't. You can't compare fluoride to unsafe levels of lead. And "cessation of tea ingestion" won't give you literal opiate withdrawals.

Calling it a safe way to do opiates is just irresponsible. It's really not that different from how manufacturers more than a century ago invented opioids and called them non addictive alternatives to morphine.

can you show me where i recommended anyone take it or called it "a safe way to do opiates"?

also can you show me a comparison between the lead levels in kratom and the fluoride (and lead) in tea?

also, don't bother. Imagine shilling for poppy seeds and one specific leaf, but lambasting a leaf from a different tree (coffee, is it because it's coffee and you're a tea drinker?)

Just... don't bother.

I possibly misunderstood you. The way you talked about it initially comparing it to oxy sounded like you were endorsing it as a safe (or legal) alternative. I've seen people endorsing it on HN of all places before and just don't like the way it's often misrepresented as something safe.

I'm still not really sure what your point with the tea is. You don't have to look very hard to see that unregulated kratom being imported from god knows where had a lot of incidents of heavy metal contamination. If this was a well known issue with tea you could buy in stores in the US I'm not aware of it. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24681...

And I'm not shilling for anything. I don't think people should be taking morphine recreationally either. Kratom blew up the way it did in popularity because people realized it's an opiate you can order legally over the internet. Your response about the tea to my disclaimer that it's not like the other plants you listed makes it sound like you think it's on the same level of safety as tea which it really isn't and people should be aware of that.

I think GP means the taste, not the effects.

There are plenty of drugs that are way better than alcohol if you are looking for a specific effect. Maybe a little too good actually, the toxicity of alcohol acts as a deterrent, no one enjoys hangovers. Most of them are illegal, but alcohol would be too if it wasn't so easy to make and part of our culture. And by the way, alcohol is the most common date rape drug by far.

But most of these drugs are not enjoyable to taste, in fact, many are downright disgusting.

Yes that's is a very good point, I would alcohol is certainly the most popular date rape drug!

Lots of drinks come close but the problem is that, despite some claims, alcohol does have a flavour.

There are some fully-fermented NA beers that use special strains of yeast that produce less alcohol that come quite close to the real thing and are very tasty, but they're just a lil off...

exactly. I drink a lot of things like Athletic over here.

I feel like you could do even better than chilies/ginger for replicating the burn. The burn from chilies feels completely different than the burn from alcohol, because ethanol is much more volatile than capsaicin. Plausibly, using a more volatile TRPV1 agonist such as allyl isothiocyanate (from horseradish/mustard) would produce an even closer effect.

Back in 2022ish a non-alcoholic bottle shop opened up across from my house so I went in with a group of 7 friends and we bought one of each bottle they carried at the time, their Amethyst Lemon Cucumber Serrano bottle was the only one that we all really loved and felt and tasted like a real spirit.

They've expanded their selection since then but I haven't tried another round since I am not dry.

I still walk over and get that bottle for parties though to accommodate my dry friends, it's amazing.

To me, alcohol burns a lot at first, in a similar way to wasabi, then it settles down to something more akin to capsaicin/ginger burn in the throat

Why recreate the burning sensation, by far the worst part about drinking alcohol? This seems like something where you could do better than the original by leaving out the unpleasantness. I guess maybe people actually like that (taste is subjective and all), but I personally hate it and it's why I don't drink much at all.

I love a bit of the burn, and I've been looking for a way to recreate it without alcohol. (probably impossible)

Alcohol feels like the only "adult drink" you can have which isn't sugar based (ironic because a lot of alcohol is sugar)

other that it's just tea, coffee, and water.

Ginger kombucha has a nice spicey burn to it that I enjoy. Not quite the same, but similar enough.

The pre-mixed kombucha dry tea I bought was super sour, like an arnild palmer. It hit like lemonade on the first tingly fizzy sip. My wife was sensitive to smell so I stopped brewing. I haven't found any kombucha that had that degree of lemonade and icea tea going. I decant into growlers so I actually get a pretty violent pop, even after refrigeration.

What I don't understand is why all kombucha is refrigerated, I only drank mine cold because it is smoother that way, but straight off the 78° bucket was fine too!

Alcohol is sugar!?

I guess you mean alcoholic drinks often contain lots of sugar, but you can have something like vodka which is pretty much water and ethanol.

For sure that ethanol was made by yeast processing sugar, but the amount in the final product is up to you!

Alcohol is distilled from sugar and its relatives. Glucose and its ilk.

Ever eaten a grape?

Why, are we out of nails?

And alcohol is a children's drink that an adult left out because life was too hectic and I'm really thirsty so I'll just finish this apple juice that's been in my car since Saturday-heyheyhey hello ethanol.

Like kombucha was probably an accident, as was mead, incredibly lucky that yeast and lactobactre can outcompete nearly every other pathogen in the exact temperature ranges humans live under

I uh, you’re so edgy?

If you were thrown off by the 'nails' comment, it's a reference:

https://www.math.ttu.edu/~pearce/jokes1/joke-270.html

The way I've heard the joke always involves a duck going to a lemonade stand and asking for grapes, but this was the best Google result I found, so...

Appreciate that. No, I glossed over the nails comment. I indeed did not get it, but like the rest of said response, most of it didn’t make sense.

Thank you for the context.

It didn't make sense? Are you sure? or are you just being uncharitable on HN? How do you think alcohol was discovered? How about any fermented food? Do you think someone drank 3 day old juice because they wanted to? Or leftover cabbage from the party this weekend?

Do you know what Kombucha is? What lactobactre, and yeast are? You've never accidentally fermented anything? You don't have kids or your life isn't hectic, you've never imbibed ethanol?

I recommend starting from maltose or fructose, personally. Did you get to the third line of the comment you were replying to?

(Distillation is independent of fermentation, you can get as far as Champagne (or 20% hooch with turbo yeast) without firing up the still.)

Personally, a bit of zing is okay. Not too much tho. I don't like alcohol because of the aftertaste and too much of that burning feeling (if we're talking about something more alcoholic than beer).

A few days ago I made spirit free gin and it had a very faint zingy feeling due to the ginger.

However, I can't stand the mouthfeel of wine, as the article says I get my mouth all dry and bitter. But tea is OK for me. So I might enjoy a mocktail made with tea

It's really baked into the experience, and there's over a century (maybe two?) of evolution of cocktails that play well with it. I think the harsh flavor helps balance a lot of strong flavors and lets you build up powerful and complex combinations without anything becoming overwhelming. For now, mocktails are still just mock cocktails. They are missing the backbone that alcohol provides. Someday another strong flavor backbone will be discovered, and a new family of drinks will be built around it, with an new name. They'll be too good to call "mocktails."

Well, I have to say the more creamy Mocktails that use condensed sweetened milk or the ones using soy sauce are so savory that they probably would suck with alcohol, imho. I'd say there's a difference between just replacing alcohol with an alcohol less version and building structured spirit free cocktails from the ground up like those you can find in the books good drinks and Zero

“Tasting like alcohol” is a bit beside the point, IMO. What limits mocktails is that many ingredients and flavors dissolve in alcohol that don’t dissolve well in water.

Yeah, though you can largely get around this if you don't have a reason to strictly avoid alcohol per se. A bit of bitters in a mocktail is not going to give you any of the physiological effects of alcohol consumption. If you're in AA or a practicing muslim or have some other thing going on you know your business about it and probably (?) wouldn't do this. But for most people it's fine.

The article is interesting, but I didn't come away with it feeling like I have any idea how to replicate the flavor of alcohol in a non-alcoholic drink.

>If you've been following along, you may have concluded that you should be brewing up a batch of bitter, spicy, slightly sweet tea the next time you serve as designated driver. Gross.

>But, there's no need to do that.

Ok, so what do I actually do lol?

I think this advice is useful for mixed drinks which already have a lot of flavorful non-alcoholic ingredients like a bloody mary, but I doubt anybody is going to come up with a good substitute for a dry martini any time soon.

I drink alcohol sometimes, but at fancy experimental places, I feel like mocktails are often MORE exciting than cocktails, because they are more willing to stray from the alcohol-tasting flavor palette. There's just so many cool flavors that are left somewhat unexplored because fancy drinks tend to skew so much to alcohol.

The article seemed very promising to me. I don’t drink and would like to have something fancy, innovative to drink some times when I bored of water, juices and soda.

But then the article starts saying the goal is to mimic alcohol taste. I don’t drink precisely because I hate the taste of alcohol. Bummer.

So far, the best NA cocktail I've found is Phony Negroni - their negronis and amaro are quite good:

https://stagrestis.com/pages/non-alcoholic

Scanning the list wondering why opioid addicts haven't figured this one out yet; less drugs, more fun.

I've actually been semi-addicted to grapefruit juice.

Alcohol in cocktails is like MSG in cooking. Sometimes you just have to sneak some in there to tie everything together.

Shrubs are a fun addition as well. They seem to have fallen out of favor in the last couple years.

I could never get into shrubs because the vinegar smell was overpowering. They tasted fine-ish, but no thank you.

Apple Cider Vinegar is a great base for mocktails.

Trader Joes Jalapeno Lemonade as base

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