We Got Tipsy (Sorta) on a New Kind of Nonalcoholic Spirit

I’m here at my neighborhood bar to feel … something. What that feeling is supposed to be, I don’t quite know. Buzzed, perhaps. Maybe tipsy. But only, I’m told, the best parts of being tipsy: relaxation, conviviality, a light yen for human connection. The chance to forget, for one moment, the unrelenting terror of being alive.

I’m not drinking alcohol. In its place, I have science. Specifically, what I’ve got is a room-temperature shot of a somewhat cloudy nonalcoholic drink called Sentia, which has newly arrived on US shores.

Sentia Spirits is a “0% ABV Alcohol Free Botanical Drink” that nonetheless promises a bit of ooh-la-la—a feeling its makers hope is pleasant enough that you won’t feel the need to back it up with a much riskier shot of whiskey.

Sentia’s nonalcoholic drinks don’t contain any particular drug, quite. But a single-ounce dose does offer a feeling a little like that first moment you know you’ve had a drink: It is a promise of drunkenness that never quite comes. I feel a bit of fuzziness in my frontal lobe, a tingling premonition.

“It’s not a buzz, really,” says one of multiple bartenders who also agreed to taste Sentia’s three flavors—GABA Gold, GABA Red, and GABA Black—in the spirit of scientific inquiry. “It’s a lightness. It’s the good part of being high without the dumb.”

Another bartender, asked to describe the sensation, makes a couple noncommittal hand gestures, then figures he’ll find words for it later.

In the language of Star Trek, Sentia is synthehol—a psychoactive drink that theoretically offers fewer consequences than alcohol and, of course, no hangover.

So how do nonalcoholic drinks get you tipsy? And is it pleasant? We’ve got a few thoughts, after trying Sentia’s three flavors with the help of a few of South Philly’s finest bartenders.

A Scientific Pedigree

Let’s be clear: Products similar to Sentia are often the sketchy purview of bong shops and gas station front windows, or that aisle in a natural foods store that always smells like potter’s clay.

But Sentia comes with a pedigree. The drink was developed by a quite reputable British neuropsychopharmacologist named David Nutt, a chair at Imperial College London who enjoys a Saturday glass of wine but has long advocated for solutions to the health scourge of alcohol abuse —which the CDC estimates causes about 178,000 deaths in the United States annually, not counting the car crashes.

Nutt—who was personally sacked as a government adviser by Britain’s home secretary for presenting evidence that alcohol caused more harm overall than cannabis or LSD—isn’t trying to stop people from seeking social lubricants. The company he cofounded, GABA Labs, is instead trying to introduce possible substitutes, including a molecule called “alcarelle” that’s currently being tested.