First, let me lay my cards on the table: I like alcoholic beverages. I'm not much of a drinker as such—it only takes a drink or two to get me feeling Done for the night and I very rarely even hit that limit—but I really enjoy the depth and breadth of flavor offered by both spirits and cocktails. They're particularly good at expressing flavor outside the savory/sugary spectrum that most other comestibles occupy. Spirits and cocktails are a particular interest of mine, and that definitely shapes my feelings on this subject to some degree.

But that's not the heart of my complaint. As someone who makes a lot of cocktails, I consider it part of my basic hospitality to have non-alcoholic options available for people who want them for any reason. And I don't just mean the basics like a can of soda—I keep a thorough repertoire of non-alcoholic mixed drinks on hand specifically so I can make everyone something that feels fancy and tailored to their palate.

It's from this angle that I mostly approach the category of "non-alcoholic spirits", and through this lens that I find it lacking. Part of it is that most of the ones I've tasted—admittedly not a terribly broad swath—just aren't very good. They lack textural body and their flavors are often just a bunch of separate notes that don't come together into a unified whole. But the heart of what bothers me is that they're aping alcoholic spirits, and there's no reason to do that.

In fairness, "no reason" may be overstating my case a bit. I'm sure there are compelling marketing reasons to describe something as "non-alcoholic gin" or "zero proof whiskey", but I don't think it does the product itself any favors. It simultaneously oversells and undersells the so-called spirit by standing it up for an impossible comparison while also failing to say anything about what it actually is. Is it water, oil, or vinegar based? Is it an infusion, a decoction, or a percolation? What flavor profile is it bringing to the table? All of these are critical questions when actually planning to drink a spirit or mix it in a cocktail, but they're all overshadowed by the framing as a "spirit replacement".

A chemical aside: why are non-alcoholic spirits so different?

The experience of drinking a liquid has a lot of sensory components. There's the texture and even temperature of the liquid, the "burning" sensation of a high alcohol content, the flavor on your tongue, and the scents in your nose (which themselves change over the course of a single sip). The temperature is pretty easy to control. The alcohol burn is hard to replicate and debatable whether it's even worthwhile^[1]. But the parts in between—flavor and texture—are more complicated, and intimately tied to the actual chemistry at play.

For better or for worse, ethanol (the chemical name for what we commonly call "alcohol" in beverages) is particularly good at providing both flavor and texture.…

witch's curse: lip balm doesn't work on you anymore

The Latin phrase et al is short for et alium, meaning "and garlic", originally used in recipes to indicate that they should include the baseline ingredients considered obviously delicious additions to all foods. It gradually got extended to mean "and the other obvious additions" in a broader sense, and with this meaning was adopted into various Romance languages and those influenced by them, such as English.

referring to a place by an exonym is imperialist but using the local language for it is appropriative, so please be sure to refer to locations by coordinates only. unfortunately longitude is eurocentric so please instead use the new Coordinated Universal Meridian which places 0° latitude at the weighted median location of all of Earth's population, updated annually based on the latest available data and published in the Coordinates Universal Meridian Mandatory Yearly Supplement

Liz has, for various reasons, historically struggled to find the bandwidth to watch TV and movies. in recent years though that's been changing! she watched sixteen films this month which I think might be a lifetime record for her

but every silver lining has a cloud, as the saying goesn't—the more stuff Liz wants to watch, the fewer things I can justify watching on my own! oops

I think it's really cool that a universal linguistic constant is using another language's word for "bread" to mean "bread in the style of that cuisine", and I think we should broaden the application of that pattern substantially. For example I think every language should use a transliteration of the word "car" to refer specifically to needlessly oversized vehicles with terrible mileage

not so much a costume as just me being hot in a slightly more goth-inflected direction. we got one group of trick-or-treaters quite unexpectedly and they said "whoa what smells so good" (it was the hot pot)

Me: You ever think about how amazing consciousness is? Like, how everything beautiful in the world exists not just in itself but also in the reflection in the minds and hearts of every single person who appreciates it?
Zandra: Except for Jim the Philosophical Zombie.
Jim the Philosophical Zombie: I deeply appreciate beauty! ...as far as you can tell 😉