“This tastes like wort*.”

My friend scrunched his face as he set the non-alcoholic golden ale back down on the wobbly taproom table. I crumpled inside a bit as the words left his mouth. It sounds dramatic, but I was four months sober, and  I really needed him to like the “beer”.

Even though I agreed with him and even though I hadn’t brewed the beer in question, I was really emotionally invested in it tasting like the “real” stuff. As a fellow brewer and close friend, his opinion on beverages matters to me.

Ten years ago, when I was in my late thirties, I entered the beer industry. I started out as a utility infielder, offering my hands and back wherever they were needed. Sometimes that was emptying pallets of low-fill cans that didn’t pass the quality check for market, sometimes it was catching the cans on the end of the canning line to box them up. Always, it was lots and lots of cleaning. Within a few months, I had worked my way up to Packaging Manager, and from there, to brewing. In all, I spent a decade brewing and packaging and doing HR and events at four different breweries.

I also developed a hell of a drinking habit that I had never experienced at any other point in my life.

It makes sense really – the heavy drinking in the industry that creates one of the most popular and easily accessed drugs. The craft beer industry takes a socially acceptable consciousness-altering substance and makes it much more than acceptable: it becomes basically inescapable and very nearly mandatory. The fact that access to free or reduced price alcohol (often meant to supplement historically low wages) draws in not only folx who already struggle with the allure of alcohol but also those who don’t even know that they will struggle with it is hardly surprising. After having it in their faces nearly daily and entrenched in the work they do, it’s just statistics.

Days can be long in the brewing industry, but they’re almost always made longer by the 1-3 hours of drinking that tends to happen after many if not all work shifts. Suddenly, a 9 or 10 hour work day can become a 10-14 hour day spent at work drinking the fruits of your hard work and commiserating with your fellow beer miners.

Sure, different breweries have different expectations and different cultures, but even if you just take that six pack of low-fill beers home to drink on your own, those 45-60 hour work weeks spent making the elixer of your relief are bound to justify your consumption.

And checks and balances are hard to come by – your days and social hours are spent with other people who enjoy the flavors of the products they’ve made just as much as you do. Even when you visit the doctor, generally a decent place to get something of a reality check on the healthiness of your habits, you find clever ways to respond to their questions about how much you drink.  You already know that it’s far above average compared to the general population, but you also know that the comparison isn’t a  fair one at all.

After all, who has more access to and need to interact with alcohol than you do? How DO you measure all of the legitimate quality checks you have to do over the course of a work week? Would you drink three 8% chocolate stouts after work if you were a civilian and you hadn’t spent so much time brewing and packaging it yourself?

I took to answering my health care provider’s question of “How many drinks a week do you have?” with “I work in the brewing industry. <smiley face>.”

What else could I do?

By the time I realized that the life I was leading was unsustainable, I had developed a sophisticated palate and a deep understanding of the way flavors work to satisfy our tastebuds. I didn’t have a taste for  PBR or Bud Light – I had never had that. Before my penchant for heavy drinking, I had skipped the flavorless in favor of water. Now, however, I wanted the intricacies of full-bodied stouts with the right balance of bitter coffee and residual sweetness, the delicate dance of multiple layers of New Zealand hops playing across my tongue in an IPA, and the clean slide of a crisp pilsner popping against the roof of my mouth. I was into earthy, heady red wines, and peaty scotches.

How then, when I decided that nothing more than .5% alcohol** in a beverage would serve my life goals, was I to enjoy the watery, wort-heavy non-alcoholic beers on offer by most breweries? How was I, someone who had spent a decade of my adult life learning to appreciate and brew delicate, delicious adult beverages, suddenly supposed to resign myself to the sad offerings of people who clearly didn’t understand what made craft beer great?

The truth is that it has taken a LOT of searching. It has required regarding the NA beverages I’m tasting with the same amount of respect that industry members treat the ones with alcohol.

Creating a successful NA beer or cocktail should come from the same place of curiosity and creativity that birthed modern craft beers and cocktails. What elevates something from a watery Miller Lite lookalike or a glass of fruit juice garnished with a slice of lime and an incomprehensible $14 price tag is a respect for the art of flavor and balance. A lot of NA beers taste like unfermented beer because they lack body and bitterness, and most mocktails taste like unsophisticated juice because they lack complexity; complexity that can be achieved with the careful balance of smoke, bitterness, acidity, and unexpected floral or spice characteristics.

I understand the impulse to just remove the alcohol and call it a day. Most of what separates the average run of the mill cocktail or beer from juice or unbearable sweetness is the alcohol. It’s a shift in perspective for most people to have to consider what makes something truly enjoyable to consume without a buzz; to take a moment and consider that an adult beverage can represent something more than just a drink that it’s illegal to offer to your five year old.

What my fellow beer miners and I were seeking in those long hours spent drinking our hard work and talking about our lives wasn’t just the quieting of our overwhelmed frontal lobes; it was just as much about community and connection, the bonding of adults over something worthy of our tastebuds. We wanted something that only adults want to drink without the consequences that adults have to pay.

With thoughtfulness and creativity, nothing has to taste like wort. I promise.

*wort is the unfermented, sugary precursor to beer, before the yeast has had a chance to work its magic trading sugar for CO2 and alcohol

**the same amount of alcohol occurring in most kombucha, some fruits, and honey, among other foods not associated with intoxication