How we taste

There is more non-alcoholic drink on the market than at any point in history, and most of it is not worth your money. Finding out which is which is expensive — one disappointing four-pack at a time. Taking that off you is the whole job.

We try everything.

Samples, trade shows, wholesale orders, things we buy ourselves because somebody would not stop talking about them. If it is a serious non-alcoholic beverage and we can get hold of it, it gets opened. Trying it is the cheap part.

Most of it does not make the cut.

This shelf is short on purpose. For every product listed here there are several we opened, drank, and did not order again. Nothing is on this site because a rep was persuasive, because the can photographs well, or because the margin was good. Those are the three reasons bad drinks end up on shelves.

The test is whether we would drink it.

Not whether it is technically impressive, and not whether it tastes like the alcoholic original — it will not. The question is whether we would actually order it in three situations: out with people and not drinking, sitting down to a proper meal, and at the end of a long day when you want a glass in your hand and nothing else. A drink has to earn its place in at least one of those. The ones that fail usually fail all three.

What normally goes wrong.

Sweetness standing in for structure is the commonest failure by a distance — take the alcohol out, panic, add sugar. After that it is a top note with nothing behind it: a burst of pepper or bitterness that has gone before you have swallowed. Third is the drink that only works ice-cold and freshly cracked, which is no use to anyone nursing one glass through an evening.

What we put on the page.

Every product here carries our own note: what it actually tastes like, how we would serve it, and why it earned a place at all. Where a maker publishes real detail — what is in it, how much sugar, what does the bittering — we use it, because the specifics are usually what separates a good can from a clever one.

Your review beats ours.

Ours is one shop, one opinion, formed before the product ever went up for sale. Yours is the can in your fridge on a Wednesday. If you have had something from here, tell us what you thought — we would rather print your words than ours, and we will put them on the page underneath our own.