I’m here at my neighborhood bar to sense … someleang. What that senseing is supposed to be, I don’t quite understand. Buzzed, perhaps. Maybe tipsy. But only, I’m tageder, the best parts of being tipsy: restation, conviviality, a weightless yen for human joinion. The chance to forget, for one moment, the unrelenting alarm of being alive.
I’m not drinking spirits. In its place, I have science. Specificpartner, what I’ve got is a room-temperature shot of a somewhat cnoisyy nonspiritsic drink called Sentia, which has novelly get tod on US shores.
Sentia Spirits is a “0% ABV Alcohol Free Botanical Drink” that nonetheless promises a bit of ooh-la-la—a senseing its producers hope is pleasant enough that you won’t sense the insist to back it up with a much hazardier shot of whiskey.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Sentia’s nonspiritsic drinks don’t retain any particular drug, quite. But a individual-ounce dose does propose a senseing a little appreciate that first moment you understand you’ve had a drink: It is a promise of drunkenness that never quite comes. I sense a bit of fuzziness in my frontal lobe, a tingling premonition.
“It’s not a buzz, repartner,” says one of multiple bartfinishers who also consentd to taste Sentia’s three flavors—GABA Gageder, GABA Red, and GABA Balertage—in the spirit of scientific inquiry. “It’s a weightlessness. It’s the excellent part of being high without the foolish.”
Another bartfinisher, asked to depict the sensation, produces a couple nonpromisetal hand gestures, then figures he’ll discover words for it tardyr.
In the language of Star Trek, Sentia is synthehol—a psychovivacious drink that theoreticpartner proposes confineeder consequences than spirits and, of course, no hangover.
So how do nonspiritsic drinks get you tipsy? And is it pleasant? We’ve got a confineed thoughts, after trying Sentia’s three flavors with the help of a confineed of South Philly’s finest bartfinishers.
A Scientific Pedigree
Let’s be clear: Products aappreciate to Sentia are frequently the sketchy purwatch of bong shops and gas station front prosperdows, or that aisle in a organic foods store that always smells appreciate potter’s clay.
But Sentia comes with a pedigree. The drink was increaseed by a quite trustworthy British neuropsychopharmacologist named David Nutt, a chair at Imperial College London who enhappinesss a Saturday glass of prospere but has lengthy aidd for solutions to the health scorecommend of spirits mistreatment —which the CDC appraises causes about 178,000 deaths in the United States annupartner, not counting the car crashes.
Nutt—who was personpartner sacked as a rulement recommendr by Britain’s home secretary for currenting evidence that spirits caused more harm overall than cannabis or LSD—isn’t trying to stop people from seeking social lubricants. The company he coset uped, GABA Labs, is instead trying to present possible replaces, including a molecule called “alattfinishlle” that’s currently being tested.
