The Rise of Non-Alcoholic Beverages

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You know, we nerds here at Science Friday have been thinking a lot about the science of alcohol More data is coming out that shows it's not really good for us to drink, but a lot of us do it anyway. So what's going on in the chemistry of our alcoholic bevies? And what are they doing to our brains and bodies Joining me now are Dror Tom Shellhammer, a brewer and professor of fermentation science at Oregon State University. He's the past president of the American Society of Brewing Chemists. And dor. Jackie Barker, who studies what alcohol does to our brains and our memories at Drexel University's College of Medicine. Welcome to Science Friday to you both. It's great to have you with us I'm delighted to be here. Likewise Jackie, start us off, how do you think about this tension? that we know drinking isn't good for us, but we do it anyway? Sure, yeah. And I think one of the challenges is being informed. and I think it's really awesome that you're starting this conversation because being able to have the information to make a smart choice about whether you want to enjoy a beer or two beers Or maybe you make that near biger decision. It starts with that information. And I think there's a growing appreciation that even small amounts of alcohol do impact our brain, do impact behavior. But so do a lot of other things we do, eating lunch meat, sodas, living in a city where you have to rely on cars. And so we're all making choices across our lives about which rewards are valuable enough to us to maybe take some risk alongside them Jackie, do you drink? I do. I do. Tom, Do you drink I do. Yeah, for me, it's soft serve ice cream, which in Vermont we call creamies and I know it's not doing me any good physically, but mentally. It is crucial to my mental health Oh yeah, I think we need to do things that make us enjoy ourselves and happy. and alcohol is part of that. I think it's been part of that for you know Mill Yes. We have a lot of listeners who have questions about alcohol and its effects on us and things that we've sort of heard over the years maybe, but don't really know what the science says. So let's start with this call that we got about alcohol Hi, my name's Mike, and I'm calling from Santa Barbara, California I've always wondered if it's just kind of a psychoematic thing, but do different alcohols affect different people differently I feel really good in almost no hangover the next day. but when I drink gin or rum, I feel pretty bad And am I just making this up because I want to like teequila Or does it really have different effects on different people's physiologies That's it. Thank you I love this question because I have heard that so many times over the year that certain alcohol will make you feel a certain way and others won't. Is that right, Jackie? or is it all in our heads? Well I think that the answer to this is yes and no, right? So and I hope Tom will weigh in as well, but I think part of this is that the way we drink different alcohol is often very different. Tequila shots might look like a very different night than red wine on your couch. And the speed that you consume that alcohol, whether you're eating with your alcohol or having a night out dancing whether you are staying hydrated alongside that is going to have a variety of different effects on that next morning and on how you associate learned experiences and environmental outcomes with that particular alcohol. And so I think a lot of people I hear also, you know, I have a really fun time. I get we used to call it getting wheels when I was in college when I have tequila, or I always feel really relaxed and want to read a book when I have red wine. That's not necessarily the difference of the alcohol. It's the context and how you've learned to consume those alcohols Yeah, Tom, what about the chemistry here? Is alcohol just alcohol just alcohol? or are there differences It kind of depends. So like the basic The productrouction process of making any alcoholic beverage starts with some sort of forermentable sugar and you sacrice the servSA, mainly in some other cases, some differentiff secondcamces or non scrimoce strains, but these organisms are converting these fermentable sugars into ethanol And ethanol is the alcohol that we find in all alcoholic beverages. Staring material varies, grapes are fermented to wine, mashed, malted barley is fermented into beer agave is fermented into poolce and these ethanol in them but theyll have these other components that come from the starting material. That's what makes wine taste different than beer that tastes different than pulca And then if we've got a distillation on top of that concentrating the ethanol and we concentrate some of these other flavorants that are coming from either byproducts of the fermentation or from the starting materials. So you ferment wine, you get brandy, ferment beer, you get whiskey from at Pker Giculular On one hand, the ethanol part is like common thread amongst Alis It's these other minor components that make Brandy tastes different than tequila or certainly wine tastes different than beer And as Jackie pointed out It's the combination of these things and also then what you do with the beverage byself, are you drinking tequila straight or are you making margitas out of it? If if you're making margaritas, you get both sugar and salt there that are kind of have an interplay with alcohol and the cumulative effect and it kind of impacts how you're going to feel that evening or the next morning While we're talking about how we react to alcohol, let's listen to another call that we got A I was wondering Yeah certain people. becausecause yter night, I had about teen shots worth of alcohol over the course of four hours on nearly an empty stomach I went to sleep it about two AM and I woke up at eight AM the next day feeleing completely fine except I ran around my entire neighborhood. about five times over and absolutely wrecked my house So I'm just wondering if it metabolizes into something different or how bestidation works for different people Thanks. Okay, well, that's quite a story, Jackie, what do you make of it and how we process alcohol So know whether alcohol is sedative at a given moment for a person is going to depend on a lot of things that will depend on the dose. how much alcohol certainly Bob, I believe it was, consumed a fairly high dose of alcohol here. and that would certainly be a sedative dose across a large range of conditions My first thought is that Bob may have woken up still intoxicated, which drove him to be motivated to run around and perhaps impact his home in unexpected ways. I mean, I will say that as we metabolize alcohol, right, our blood alcohol concentration will come back down. and so you may reach some of those less sedative doses on both ends, right? So you have sort of an ascending side and then a descending side of this blood alcohol concentration in this case where he's consuming and then metabolizing. And so depending on the exact timing of the runabout, he may sort of been in that stimulatory phase of intoxication at that time Jackie, what do you think about tolerance in terms of like for a person who is a regular consumer of alcohol versus someone who isn't, I think these effects can be very different Yes, I completely agree, Tom. Absolutely. People who are regular consumers do develop tolerance. It is absolutely the case that people who regularly drink, especially if they drink Instead of being a regular binge drinker, for example, where you drink a large amount of alcohol only on Friday night, for example, someone who is drinking frequently on repeated consecutive days is very likely to develop tolerance and be able to consume higher amounts of alcohol without experiencing as high sedative effects or potentially those deleterious acute consequences Tom Bob also didn't tell us what was in the shots. know do things that are added to alcohol sometimes change the way we feel and react to them? I mean, some shots might have a lot of sugar in them, some could even have caffeine or other things. Yeah. Yeah, exactly that's exactly what I was going to it. Like if you're mixing caffeine and ethanol That's I call amplifying combination, but it's a catalyzing combination. And that's one reason why like we don't see caffeinated alcoholic drinks anymore on the market because they can be potentially dangerous. if you don't really realize the alcohol level that you're consuming or the caffeine that you're consuming You're kind of cranking both of those up and you get yourself in kind of a dangerous spot Well, that actually brings us to our next call Hi, my name's Sadie. I'm calling from Burlington, Vermont. I feel like I always hear people saying, you know, Tom, I saw you nodding as Sadie was talking about sugary drinks and the interaction Yeah, I'm thinking less about like a biochemical interaction, but more of like a sort of physiological maybe lifestyle interaction. Sugar is one of these these molecules that as humans we love, right? We're just prime or're like little hummingbirds in some respects. So we love sugar sort of stimulates that I like it button So that can potentially people intoed consuming more alcohol than that they had realized, particularly if drinking b sugary drinks Alcohol itself is a diuretic, so it has a dehydrating effect. Sugar kind of amplifies that as well So you kind of moving yourself into this area where you're very going be very prone to like the effects the detoxification effects of alcohol. you got ethanol detoxification, but you also have this dehydration that you can feel like you're drinking a lot. And in fact, you are, Your body's not hydrating, it's actually dehydrating just kind of turning into like a little human raisin. so. We have to take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to talk about shifts in people's tastes for alcohol and why low ABV is having a moment. Stay with us I'my Scott, host of How We Survive, a podcast about the messy business of climate solutions To a lot of people, geoengineering might seem like a dangerous, outlandish way to play God. Some are embracing this sci fi inspired approach as a solution to the climate crisis Listen to how we survive on your favorite podcast app All right, let's take another listener question. Hi, this is Kristen from Ventura, California And I am dying to know more about relationship drinking alcohol, specifically wine and how much you need to be drinking to where you are most likely going to cause harm to your body. And the reason I'm asking that is weve swayed back and forth as a nurse. I've seen it information site drinking a glass of wine for you, then now it's like, no, don't drink any, none of it is good for you But my question for you is then what are people in Italy and France, how are they getting away with it? or are they not I do enjoy a glass of wine with dinner. It's part of my culture But again, I don't want to be causing any harm. All right, thank you so much By There's a lot in that question. So you know How are we to make sense of this when people have had cultures of drinking for you know generations in some cases? Jackie, what do you think Yeah. so I mean I think part of what was mentioned in that call is sort of this idea of consuming alcohol with a meal. I do think that this reflects in part a cultural difference that was hit on a little bit there in the US versus other places where often in other cultures you are having a glass of wine with dinner, not having as prevalent of a binge like relationship as is seen often in the US But to the science, I think that there are very clear emerging data that any alcohol is potentially having negative health consequences. Even a single glass of alcohol can increase risk for various cancers, cardiovascular disease. again Being informed of that means you can make the right choice for you. Is it worth it to increase your risk at whatever level it is? And people can make that decision? But I think some of those early studies, there' have been controversy around this idea that people who drink low amounts of alcohol are healthier than abstainers Some of the data around that seem to suggest that actually there are a variety of confounds. People who completely abstain from alcohol often have other co occurring health conditions. And so it may reflect that they have shorter life expectancy, other things that may drive the abention, not drinking at all, and then artificially make it seem like our low drinkers are a healthier population. So it's not positive there. There's a lot baked into the data set that I think kind of created that false impression 've been hearing a lot recently about the difference in how we metabolize alcohol as we age and that that can also make a really big change in how you experience drinking and weether and how much you choose to drink. Do you know about that science, Jackie So it is definitely the case that alcohol metabolism is al as as a range of metabolic outcomes as we age. Some of this is related to if you have been a chronic drinker across your life, potentially accumulated effect on the liver, which can in fact impact metabolism. It also may be related to sort of a greater medical treatment burden as we age, right? You might be taking additional medications that are metabolized by similar processes. And so that might impact outcomes as well. But it is definitely the case that we see physiological changes that can facilitate ethanol impacts where the same doses can have greater impacts as we age You know, off course, Tom, not everybody chooses to drink alcohol and some people choose to drink things that are like alcohol but do not contain alcohol, and we're seeing a really large growth in no or low ABV beer where the alcohol has either been taken out or wasn't brewed into the process. Can you talk a little bit about how those drinks are being made and how you see that trend going Yeah, you're correct, Jane. There's a huge growth. category in low and non alcoholic beverages beer, wine and spirits the divide that you have to cross to get from it a non alcoholic spirit, like from a spirit or a noncoholic spirit is huge brerewers have to cross a much shorter divide. It's like only five percent. And so I think that's why you're seeing a lot of activity in this non alcoholic beer space. The way that brewers are making non alcoholic beer fall into sort three categories. One is to take a normal fermentation and just arrest it, stop it prematurely Those are kind of first generation n Alip beers. They're not terribly satisfying because they taste very wordy, very sweet, they're kind of cloying. They don't mimic a full on call beer Another approach is to use techniques we take a full strength beer and remove the alcohol So you can do this by distillation or by membrane separation happens there is that you in addition to pulling alcohol out, you're also pulling out a lot of these other flavors like we talked at the beginning of the show around like higher alcohols or esters or other things that will move kind of like the ethanol away from the base spear And so you get a very bland product. And so in that case Brewers will do flavor adms that will take the like these alcohol like higher alcohol extra materials have left and add those back to try to replace that minus the ethanol And then a third approach is to use yeast that don't ferment maltose. So the main sugar in a brewy mash is maltose. There's a little bit of glucose, tiny bit of fructose, but mainly maltose from a fermentability perspective, and something called maltotriose we hunt for yeast that don't metabolized maltose, then we get a very small fermentation but it doesn't bring the alcohol level above point , which is kind of like a threshold for low alcohol And what like really successful brands are doing are blending these different approaches. But some brands are doing you great with this L you look at Guinness Zero It's just like taken off. this's way outperformed what they thought when they first started this. and that's not not on a big scale. We've got smaller brewers like to shoot. that a big part of their brand now is their non alcoholic line. You have athletic, it's a whole brewery that is just around non alcoholic beer. and that ery itself is like the fifth largest brand of craft beer. That's interesting. So and it's the one that's growing and like a many many breweries and wineeries ind everything's kind of in a declining stage right now because the demographics of young drinkers kind of moving away from alcohol, the discussions we've had around health a focus on lifestyle changes, people wanting to either not have as much calorific intake and maybe not as much inhubration or intoxication So That's driving this interest in the non alcoholic space Jackie, I mean, we're especially seeing this in younger generations that are coming into legal age for drinking and are choosing not to or are choosing to drink much less. Is that related to some of what we've been hearing about alcohol being less healthy? orr is there something else afoot, do you think I mean, I do think part of it, I hope, is public health messaging. We are actually effectively communicating to people that there is negative consequences to high levels of alcohol intake. I do think there's also very real behavioral changes in how young people are spending their Friday nights compared to I'm not gonna to make any guesses about anyone's age, but compared to how I spent my Friday nights