Lyre’s Non-Alcoholic Bourbon Alternative Review

By Richard Thomas

Rating: D

With the rise of the “New Sober,” more and more non-alcoholic (NA) substitutes for alcoholic beverages have come to market and in new categories. I’ve tried the NA alternatives for wine, and without exception they have reminded me of O’Douls. Introduced in 1990, O’Douls was (curiously enough) not actually zero alcohol, but instead ultra-low alcohol at below 0.5%. It was also arguably worse than even such piss water, bargain basement brands as Busch. A liquor store curiosity for decades, recent times have seen it supplanted by zero alcohol beers like Heineken 0.0, which is actually on par with normal Heineken.

Yet the journey from O’Douls to Heineken 0.0 took three decades, and more intense interest from liquor companies determined to quioxtically chase the New Sober contingent of Gen Z can only accelerate matters to a certain degree. The alternative wine I have tried has, without exception, sucked. It was not a substitute for wine, and that sector has a long way to go. But what about NA bourbon?

The Alternative
I started by approaching Lyre’s Bourbon Alternative as if it were a direct alternative to bourbon, intended as a sipper. The nose showed some promise: graham cracker, cedar, caramel. Although nothing special, it was on par with a several craft whiskeys I had back in the 2010s. The palate is where things went down hill: Lyre’s is basically watery caramel syrup.

But I suspect this stuff was not really intended as a direct substitute for bourbon in the way that a zero-alcohol beer really is meant to be drank instead of normal beer. Most of the coverage of non-alcohol whiskey substitutes I have seen are centered on their use in mocktails, so I made a beaker of mocktail Old Fashioned with Lyre’s and served it up for myself and my son. The boy liked it; I wished I had a real Old Fashioned, but was thought using it as a mocktail ingredient was definitely a step up from sipping on the stuff neat.

I must couch my take on Lyre’s in the same vein as my take on vegan fake bratwurst: I am not vegan, so I am not grading on a curve. The question I’m answering is how a person who has no need to resort to alternatives will receive the product. My take was as a sipping whiskey, this is an F; but as a mocktail base, I rate it as a C. Taking the average, the overall rating is D.

The Price
The MSRP on this bottle is $38.