About a month ago I went down a rabbit hole on the internet - which is an entirely normal thing to do on a Wednesday evening when you're 46 and sober and the kids are in bed - and I came across a category of drinks I didn't know existed.

They call themselves "functional beers." Or "mood beers." Or, in some cases, very confident things like "the world's first beer that actually does something." The claim, in each case, is more or less the same: drink this instead of alcohol and feel something. Not drunk. Just... better. Calmer. More social. The vibe of a Friday evening without the bit where you wake up on Saturday feeling like a partially deflated bouncy castle.

I was immediately suspicious. Obviously. I've been not drinking long enough to know that most things marketed at sober people are either disguised fruit juice, or a product whose main ingredient is hope. But I'd also been drinking IMPOSSIBREW for a while by this point and genuinely noticing something - so I figured I couldn't just dismiss the whole category out of hand.

So I bought them all. Or as many as I could find. And I spent three weeks drinking my way through the UK's most enthusiastic marketing claims in the name of telling you whether any of them actually work.

Here's what I found.

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Quick table first, for those of you who are busy:

Product	Type	The claim	Does it work?
Collider	Beer	GABA enhancement, mood boost	Maybe? Hard to say.
ON Beer	Beer (IPA)	Clinically proven buzz	Good beer. Weak evidence.
Three Spirit	Spirit alt.	Energising, euphoric	Sort of, if you like cocktails
Sentia	Spirit alt.	Relaxing, GABA-targeted	Maybe. Costs a fortune.
IMPOSSIBREW	Beer	Social Blend, 2000+ person study	Yes. Not close.

For the long version, read on. I'm aware this is going to be about 2,000 words about non-alcoholic beer and I'm not going to apologise for that.

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Collider - "Unwind Blend"

Collider is a UK brand with an "Unwind Blend" that contains ashwagandha, L-theanine, lion's mane mushroom and something about GABA enhancement. It's won some awards. It comes in at 36 calories per 330ml, which - and I say this as someone who no longer cares about such things - is impressively low.

The label says "mushroom beer" and I want to be upfront: this immediately made me think of a festival. A specific kind of festival. The kind where people wear hats that don't keep the rain off and discuss the importance of being "present."¹

Taste-wise, it's actually decent. Slightly earthy but not in a bad way. More complex than your standard AF lager. I drank two of them on a Tuesday evening after work, which is peak testing conditions because Tuesday evenings are where placebo effects go to die.

Did I feel anything? Honestly - maybe slightly more chill? But I am also a man who had just got the kids to bed, put on the TV and cracked open a cold drink. There is a non-zero chance that I was relaxed because of the Tuesday evening, not the Unwind Blend. I genuinely can't separate them. I tried the same experiment on a Thursday when I was genuinely stressed about a work thing and the results were... inconclusive. Could have been the ashwagandha. Could have been the half hour of sitting still. I'm not a clinical trial.

Verdict: Nice beer. Marketing claims unverified by me specifically. Your mileage may vary.

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ON Beer - "X Blend"

ON Beer is where things get interesting. They make an IPA - a genuinely good IPA, strong hop flavour, the kind that actually tastes like something - and they've put an "X Blend" of botanicals in it. The claim is "clinically proven buzz" based on a double-blind trial. They are not shy about this claim. It is on the front of the can in confident lettering.

I want to be fair here. "Clinically proven" is a phrase that sets off alarm bells for me in the same way "all-natural" does, because technically everything is natural and technically lots of things have been proven in trials of varying quality. But - to be fair to them - ON Beer does actually seem to have done a study. I'm not going to pretend I've read it in full. I am a programmer, not a pharmacologist.²

The IPA is genuinely good. That's not a small thing. After two of them on a Friday evening, did I feel buzzy? Maybe. There was something. Whether that something was the X Blend working, or whether it was just that I'd drunk two cold IPAs on a Friday evening and my brain knows what Friday evenings mean - I genuinely can't say. The problem with all of these products is that you're trying to isolate a subtle effect from an enormous amount of psychological noise.

"Clinically proven" is doing a lot of heavy lifting on those cans. One trial. I couldn't find the sample size. Compare that to IMPOSSIBREW, who did a 2,000+ person study with an actual university. There's "clinically proven" and there's clinically proven.

Verdict: Good IPA. "Clinically proven" is doing more work than the botanicals are. I wanted it to be more than it was.

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Three Spirit - "Livener" / "Social Elixir"

I should be upfront: Three Spirit isn't a beer. It's what they call a "social elixir." Spirit alternative. You mix it with something - they suggest tonic, which is what I used - and you drink it from a glass that you'd normally put gin in. It contains lion's mane, yerba mate, damiana and cacao.

This is for people who drink Negronis. I drink pints. These are not the same people.

I include it because it came up constantly in my research when I was looking for drinks that give you a buzz without alcohol, and I thought it was fair to include the category. But I want to be honest: I had to look up what damiana was³ and I made the tonic mixer wrong the first time and it tasted like something you'd use to clean a brass instrument.

Second attempt was better. The yerba mate is basically caffeine - you feel alert in the way you feel alert after a strong tea. Which is fine, but it's not a mood lift, it's a stimulant, and "slightly more caffeinated" is not what I was looking for at 9pm on a Wednesday.

I can see the appeal if your baseline is cocktails. It's a genuinely interesting product. But if your baseline is a pint after work, it's not really solving the same problem.

Verdict: Interesting. Not for me. Probably wonderful if you're the sort of person who can keep damiana in their flat without feeling like they need to explain it to visitors.

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Sentia

Sentia is the one that got me most curious before I tried it. It was created by a neuroscientist - David Nutt, who you may know from his work on drug policy reform - specifically to target GABA receptors in the way alcohol does, but without the downsides. The science behind it is genuinely interesting. This isn't a company that stuck some ashwagandha in a drink and called it functional. There's actual neuroscience here.

It's a spirit alternative. Red, tastes like a slightly medicinal aperitif - somewhere between Campari and a cup of herbal tea that's trying its best. You mix it with soda or tonic. I had it both ways.

Did I feel something? Honestly - yes. Subtly. The word I'd use is "unwound." About 20 minutes in I noticed I was slightly less tense than I'd been before, in a way that wasn't just tiredness. Whether that's the GABA pathway doing its thing or whether I was primed by knowing there was a neuroscientist involved and wanting it to work - I can't be certain. But it felt like something.

The problem is it's £30 a bottle, it tastes medicinal, and it's not a beer. I like beer. I went back to beer after three evenings with Sentia. But I think if I were a Campari person I might feel differently.⁴

Verdict: Interesting science. Costs a fortune. Tastes like medicine. Not for beer people.

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IMPOSSIBREW - and here's where I have to be honest

Right. This is the bit where I need to be upfront with you.

I'd been drinking IMPOSSIBREW for a couple of months before I ran this experiment. Regular readers will know this - I wrote about it when I first tried it. So when I went through this whole "functional beer" testing process, I was coming back to IMPOSSIBREW at the end of it, not trying it fresh. I think that's actually useful information rather than a conflict of interest. Because the contrast was obvious.

IMPOSSIBREW is a "Social Blend" - their name for the combination of L-theanine, ashwagandha and magnesium they put in the beer. They've done a proper study with Durham University - over 2,000 participants - and 84% said they felt more relaxed. That's not a startup waving around a sample size of 30. The lager is my daily drink now. The Triple Hopped IPA is what I have at weekends when I want something with more flavour. I've had the Pale Ale too - it's good, though the IPA is my favourite.

Here's the thing about trying to evaluate whether a "mood beer" works when you've been drinking it for two months: you stop noticing it the way you stop noticing that your house is warm until you leave it. I went through three weeks of Collider and ON Beer and Sentia and came back to an IMPOSSIBREW on a Thursday evening and thought: oh, there it is.

It's not a buzz in the way alcohol is a buzz. It's not a buzz in the way caffeine is a buzz. It's more - and I'm aware this sounds like I've joined a cult - like Tuesday evening feels like Friday evening. A slight easing. The day's edges getting a bit softer. I don't fully understand why the ashwagandha and L-theanine combination works on me in a way some of the others didn't, and I'm not going to pretend I can explain the biochemistry.⁵ I just know that I reach for it most evenings now and the evenings are better for it.

I want to be clear that I'm not saying this because I have a referral link (I do, and I'll mention it at the bottom). I'm saying it because it's what happened when I went looking for a non alcoholic beer that gives you a buzz and then ran a three-week experiment comparing it to everything else on the market. The other products were interesting. This one is in my fridge.

The skeptical part of me - and I try to keep that part well-fed - acknowledges that this could still be placebo. Maybe I just like the taste and the ritual and my brain has associated IMPOSSIBREW with evenings winding down. Possible. But that's also true of alcohol, in a way. The mechanism isn't always the point. The point is whether it works.

For me, it works.

Verdict: The honest answer to whether there's a non alcoholic beer with a buzz. Yes it's the most expensive of the lot. Yes I have a referral link. And yes, it's hands down the best thing in this entire category and it's not particularly close. The research is real, the taste is real, the effect is real. I tried everything else so you don't have to.

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So that's the full experiment. Three weeks, five products, more evenings than I expected spent sitting on my own drinking things and trying to decide if I felt anything different.

The category as a whole is more interesting than I thought it would be. The science on some of these is real - not just marketing copy. Whether you'll feel it depends enormously on your particular brain chemistry, your expectations and, honestly, whether you're testing on a genuinely stressful day or a Tuesday when the kids have been fine and dinner wasn't difficult.

If you're a beer person looking for the best alcohol free beer that makes you feel relaxed - and that's most of you, I'd imagine - IMPOSSIBREW is the answer. It's not the cheapest option. But it's the one with proper research behind it, the one that actually tastes like beer, and the only one where I genuinely noticed a difference after weeks of testing everything else. The others are interesting experiments. This one is a product that works.

The spirits alternatives are a different conversation entirely. If you don't drink beer, they might be worth a look. But if you're reading a blog post about beer, I suspect that's not your situation.⁶

Thanks for reading. If you found any of this useful, share it with someone. Or don't. I'm not your manager.⁷