"Alcohol is doomed": How ‘synthenol’ science is making booze obsolete, according to an expert

“Alcohol is doomed,” says David Nutt.

Nutt knows of what he speaks. A professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College, University of London, much of his work focuses on understanding how the brain’s inhibitory circuits work, and latterly, how to toy with them to induce the same sense of calm and relaxation we get from booze.

“It probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but it’s definitely on its way out. There’s even a private acknowledgement within the alcohol industry that it’s going to be struggling by around 2050. But it just keeps going as it always has because there’s still money to be made”.

It also explains, he says, the industry’s rush to make alcohol-free versions of every beer, liqueur and spirit you can name.

• Get the buzz without the booze: The 17 best alcohol free drinks to try

But what, he laughs, is really the point of those? Are the flavours alone really that appealing? Humans have used alcohol as a route to relaxation and sociability — as well as for ceremonial and religious purposes — for millennia. “But with a non-alcoholic drink you’re really just standing there with a coloured liquid that makes you look relaxed and sociable [to other people],” he says.

“There’s a tendency to polarise thinking around alcohol such that we haven’t been encouraged to think there might be a third way. But that’s what we need — the pleasures of alcohol without the harms”.

Meet the man who knows booze best

It was Nutt who provided the first proof of alcohol’s stimulation of the brain's primary inhibitory neurotransmitters. He’s the man who showed how booze works.

But, he says, shaped by the wellness movement of recent years, more of us are also becoming aware of alcohol’s downsides. It is, as he puts it bluntly, a toxin — one that would not get regulatory approval if it were to be invented today. No wonder consumption is falling off a cliff, most starkly among twenty-somethings. And yet, he contends, we’re also aware that, when used moderately, we also benefit, as individuals and as a society, from alcohol’s effects.

The solution is the rise of start-ups — the likes of Trip, Kin, Three Spirit, to name just a few, as well as Nutt’s own Sentia — developing drinks that provide the feelings we get from booze (more chilled, more chatty) but without the booze. Some are achieving this through the use of natural ingredients - active compounds derived from the likes of botanicals, herbaceous and seed extracts, nootropics, hemp and so on. Carefully blended and apportioned, they give you a bit of a buzz, or that post-work wind-down.

The experience of drinking without alcohol

Nutt describes a couple of glasses of Sentia as comparable to the pleasantly tipsy feeling felt maybe after one or two glasses of wine.

"It makes you a little slack around the jaw, a little bit chatty, mellow,” he says, and that, crucially, drinking more of it in any one sitting doesn’t increase this sensation.

These aren’t drinks you can get drunk on, no matter how hard you try. Nor, however, will they see you feeling like you’ve been run over by the beer bus the next day. Or, when abused, increase your blood pressure, disrupt your sleep, damage your heart, liver and brain, or lead to depression and anxiety.

“Our customers still drink alcohol [in the way many people do] because they’re stressed or want to connect to people. They just want an alternative for when they don’t want all of its downsides,” says David Fudge, co-founder of ‘alt-alcohol’ drinks brand Aplos, which, he says, has seen a 500% increase in sales this year.

“These drinks are not seeking to fully replicate the experience of alcohol,” he adds.

“We speak of them being mood-altering rather than mind-altering. And the fact is that attitudes to alcohol are changing fast. Just five or so years ago it would have been considered taboo if you didn’t drink. People would assume you had some kind of alcohol problem. Now consumers don’t want that loss of control that alcohol can bring.”

Taste still matters

Of course, he stresses, this new generation of drinks still has to taste good. And while some seek to mimic established alcoholic choices, there’s clearly a time coming when it won’t be necessary for a drink that’s functional like alcohol to in any way taste alcoholic.

Rather, it’s the utility they provide that will fit them in alongside other drinks offering functional benefits — from increasing your alertness to helping with post-workout recovery.

It’s Nutt’s efforts, however, that could prove truly revolutionary.

While today’s alt-alcoholic drinks are rediscovering the effects of ingredients used in similar ways since ancient times, Nutt is taking a more scientific approach to those of tomorrow. He’s currently working to isolate and manufacture up to 13 molecules that, his research shows, interact with the right brain receptors to give that chilled feeling but with none of the toxic messiness.

He’s used this research in Sentia drinks. Among its range is a cask whisky equivalent, IPA, stout and, coming soon, a cider — but is in the process of developing what he has dubbed Alcarelle.

This, a spin on Candarel (the molecule developed to give the pleasure of sweetness without the calories) will, he says, be a clean tasteless liquid, licensed as an ingredient and, assuming the science works out, should inspire a whole new generation of non-alcoholic drinks that don’t forego the appealing sense of decompression.

Disruption is coming

“The idea you can mimic alcohol without the harms is still science fiction to a lot of people,” says Nutt. In the utopian Star Trek universe, they call the means of doing just that ‘synthenol’.

That’s science fiction both to consumers, he says, who will need to be educated about this new category of drink, but also, Nutt stresses, to the alcohol industry.

Or rather, while the alcohol industry knows it’s possible, it’s also “just a very easy, very big, well-established market and there are still people in the business who don’t want to disrupt it,” he says.

But disruption is coming.

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