Cannabis vs. alcohol: what 5,000+ consumers said about swapping their drink

What study participants thought of Fresh Press and SHAKE

There's a moment a lot of our customers describe to us, and it usually goes something like this. You're three drinks into an evening. The wine tasted great with dinner. The night was fun. But somewhere around 10 PM you started feeling foggy, around midnight you were tossing in bed, and by 7 AM the next morning you were doing the math on whether you needed coffee or a nap or both. And in that 7 AM moment, you thought to yourself, there has to be something better than this.

That's the moment 23rd State exists for. It's the moment our founder Leah lived through more times than she can count before she decided to build something different. And it's increasingly the moment that's pulling thousands of people toward cannabis beverages — not as a replacement for one specific drink in one specific situation, but as a genuine rethinking of what a relaxing evening can feel like.

For a long time, the question of whether people actually do swap alcohol for cannabis beverages — and whether they actually feel better doing it — has been answered mostly by anecdote. We've heard the stories from our customers in Minnesota and across the country, and we've shared our own. What we haven't had, until recently, is data. The kind of data that comes from a long-term, multi-thousand-person study where real people use real products in their real lives, and then tell researchers exactly what happened.

That changes on Thursday, June 4, 2026. The Network of Applied Pharmacognosy (NAP) and MoreBetter are co-hosting a free public webinar to share aggregate results from the largest study of its kind to date — and 23rd State is one of the featured sponsor brands. The findings on our flagship products, Fresh Press and SHAKE, are some of the most validating data we've seen in five years of building this brand. We want you in the room when the numbers are walked through.

The webinar at a glance

The session runs 2:00 to 3:00 PM ET on Thursday, June 4 — 30 minutes of structured content followed by 15 minutes of live audience Q&A. It's hosted on Zoom, registration is free through Zephy (with an optional donation that supports NAP's ongoing research and education work), and it's open to anyone who's curious — consumers, drinkers and non-drinkers, sober-curious folks rethinking their habits, brand operators, retailers, researchers, and policy folks. Save your spot here.

Why the cannabis-versus-alcohol conversation is finally getting interesting

If you've paid any attention to drinks media in the last three years, you've watched the conversation around alcohol shift dramatically. The Surgeon General issued a 2025 advisory linking alcohol to cancer risk. "Sober curious" went from a niche internet term to a category that grocery store buyers now plan around. Dry January moved into Damp February, then Mindful March, then a year-round wave of people reconsidering how much they actually want to drink, and when, and why.

What's been missing from that conversation is what to do instead. The non-alcoholic beer aisle has grown, but a lot of those drinks just give you the calories and the bitterness without the part you actually wanted, which is the feeling. Mocktails are great if you want something nice to hold, but they don't change the evening. Kombucha is delicious, but it's not what you want at 7 PM on a Friday after a long week.

Cannabis beverages occupy a different category entirely. The good ones — the ones that are dosed responsibly, formulated for fast onset, and made with real ingredients — deliver something alcohol can't: a relaxed, social, present-feeling shift in your evening without the trade-offs. No hangover. No middle-of-the-night wake-up. No fog the next day. No tolerance creep. No 7 AM regret.

That's what 23rd State has been building since day one. And it's what the MoreBetter study has now measured at scale.

The largest infused beverage study to date

The Real-World Infused Beverage Study run by MoreBetter is the most comprehensive consumer dataset that exists for this category. The headline numbers tell you why people across the industry have started organizing their thinking around it.

More than 5,000 participants across two cohorts. 20 brands included. Multi-week tracking of how each participant actually used the products in their daily life — when they drank them, how often, in what settings, and what they swapped out as a result. None of this is lab data or focus-group data. It's real consumers, in their real homes, drinking real beverages on real Tuesdays.

The study captures the questions that matter for anyone actually considering this swap in their own life. How often did participants substitute the infused beverage for alcohol in a given week? In which settings — solo, with a partner, at a dinner party, at the end of a hard workday? Did their daily alcohol consumption actually go down once they had a cannabis beverage in the fridge? What kind of alcohol did they end up replacing — beer, wine, cocktails, spirits, all of the above? And how did the experience compare on the dimension that matters most: did the cannabis beverage actually feel good enough to be a real swap, or did people drift back?

The June 4 webinar walks through what the data shows on every one of those questions. And then it gets into individual product performance — which is where Fresh Press and SHAKE come in.

How Fresh Press performed in the study

Fresh Press is the product that, more than anything else, lives at the center of our customers' weekly routine. It's the bottle in the door of the fridge. It's the swap for the second glass of wine, or the IPA after a long meeting, or the spritz on a summer patio. It's the drink you reach for when what you actually want is to take the edge off the day — not get drunk, just shift gears.

We launched the Perry variant — pear-forward, dry, lightly effervescent — because pear is one of those flavors that drinks like wine without trying to be wine. It pairs with food the way a good cider would. It works on its own with nothing else in the glass. It's what we'd describe as the easy everyday swap.

In Cohort 2 of the MoreBetter study, Fresh Press Perry was one of the products with data clearly called out:

53.3% of participants said they now prefer Fresh Press Perry over their usual alcohol drink.
58.3% said they would consider Fresh Press Perry as a regular replacement for alcohol.

We want to be careful with how we describe what those numbers mean, because they deserve to be described accurately. Read them slowly. More than half of the participants — people who came into the study with established alcohol habits, drinks they liked, social patterns built around a glass of something — told researchers that after spending time with Fresh Press Perry, they preferred it. Nearly six in ten said they'd consider it a regular replacement. Not an occasional treat. Not a once-in-a-while novelty. A replacement.

For a brand whose entire reason for being is offering a research-validated alcohol alternative, those are the numbers we've been working toward.

There's a broader finding from the study that also matters here. Across every 23rd State product in Cohort 2, more than 80% of participants said the product was safer than alcohol for their health. Every single one of our products cleared that bar. And every one was statistically unlikely to produce a hangover experience the next day — which, if you've ever woken up at 6:45 AM with cottonmouth and a 9 AM meeting, is not a small thing.

How SHAKE fits the picture

If Fresh Press is the easy everyday swap, SHAKE is the social occasion drink. It's what you bring to the dinner party. It's the one you reach for when you want something with more of an event feeling — when the moment calls for something you'd serve in a coupe, when guests are arriving, when the music is on.

SHAKE was built for the part of the alcohol-substitution conversation that often gets overlooked. A lot of the "drinking less" discourse is focused on the random Tuesday — the easy swap, the casual at-home use case. But for a lot of people, the harder substitution is the social one. The cocktail party. The wedding. The work dinner where everyone else is on their second martini.

That's the use case SHAKE was designed for. It holds its own in a glass alongside the people drinking real cocktails. It looks like an aperitif, behaves like an aperitif in the conversation, and delivers a relaxed lift that fits the social occasion. It's the product that lets you say yes to the event without saying yes to the next-morning version of the event.

In the MoreBetter study, SHAKE was part of the same Cohort 2 23rd State lineup that cleared the 80% safer-than-alcohol bar and the no-hangover bar. The webinar walks through that aggregate performance in detail.

What we hear from customers about SHAKE — and what aligns with the study's broader findings on social-setting substitution — is that it solves the trickiest part of cutting back. It's not hard to skip the second beer at home. It's hard to be the person not drinking at the dinner party. SHAKE makes that part not feel like skipping anything at all.

What the data actually means for your evening

Here's the part of all this that matters most if you're reading this as someone thinking about your own drinking — not as a researcher or operator, just as a person.

The cannabis-versus-alcohol comparison, on the dimensions that researchers actually measure — toxicity, addiction potential, long-term health impact — is not close. Alcohol is one of the most harmful substances regularly consumed in the United States. The relationship between alcohol and cancer alone (now formally acknowledged by the Surgeon General) is enough to make every drinker reconsider what they want their long-term relationship with the bottle to be. Cannabis, on every comparative measure available in the scientific literature, sits in a different category.

What's new — and what the June 4 webinar is built around — is that we now have consumer-behavior data layered on top of the pharmacology. The pharmacology has been clear for a while. What was uncertain was the lived-experience question: would people, given a high-quality cannabis beverage option, actually choose it over the drink they were used to? Would the swap feel good enough to last?

The answer the study gives is: yes, and especially when the product is well-designed.

That matters for you because it means the cannabis-as-alcohol-alternative conversation isn't theoretical anymore. It's not a wellness-blog speculation about what might be possible. It's a documented behavioral pattern in thousands of consumers who, given the option, opted for it. They drank less alcohol during product-use phases of the study than they did before. They reported preferring the experience. They reported sleeping better, feeling sharper the next day, and feeling better about the long-term picture of their health.

That's the conversation the June 4 webinar puts on the table.

The hosts: science you can trust

We want to take a moment on who's running this session, because it matters.

The Network of Applied Pharmacognosy is a nonprofit research and education organization founded by Dr. Miyabe Shields and Dr. Riley Kirk — two researchers who've built rare credibility translating complex cannabinoid science into language that consumers and operators can actually use. NAP works at the intersection of plant medicine, applied pharmacology, and consumer education. If you've followed either of them online, you know they don't traffic in hype. They cite their sources, push back on overstatements from inside the industry as readily as from outside it, and lead with data.

MoreBetter built the consumer-research infrastructure that makes a study at this scale possible. Their methodology — privacy-protected participant tracking, brand-agnostic analysis, multi-cohort design — is what turns 5,000 individual experiences into something the field can build on.

This isn't a sponsor-led pitch wrapped in a research bow. It's a science-led conversation about what the evidence base shows.

What you'll get out of the hour

By the end of the webinar, you'll have a clear picture of who participated in the study and what brought them to it, baseline patterns for alcohol use across the participant group, the actual substitution behavior the study captured — how often people swapped, in which settings, and what they swapped out, how daily alcohol consumption shifted from the pre-product-use phase to the during-product-use phase, how the cannabis beverage experience compared to alcohol on the dimensions consumers care about, and where Fresh Press, SHAKE, and the rest of the 23rd State Cohort 2 lineup landed on the safety and hangover-likelihood measures.

The last 15 minutes are reserved for live Q&A, which in our experience is where the most useful part of every NAP-hosted session happens. Submit questions during the session via Zoom Q&A.

A note from us, the family behind 23rd State

23rd State exists because of a personal need. Our founder, Leah, had spent years looking for something that would let her unwind in the evening without the hangovers, the foggy mornings, and the slow-creeping weight of alcohol as a daily habit. As a Minnesota mom living with MS, the trade-offs of alcohol weren't just unpleasant — they were genuinely incompatible with the life she wanted to live. So she built the thing she was looking for.

Five years later, we're a family-run cannabis beverage brand operating out of Minnesota, with a product lineup designed around one question: what would it look like to give people a research-validated alcohol alternative that they actually want to drink? Fresh Press and SHAKE are our answers to that question for two different parts of the evening — the easy everyday swap and the social occasion swap. Blush Crush, our infused bubbly, rounds out the lineup for celebrations.

We've staked a lot on independent research as the foundation for this brand. We sponsor studies because we believe consumers deserve real data, not marketing claims dressed up as evidence. The MoreBetter Real-World Infused Beverage Study is the most important credibility asset we have, and the June 4 webinar is the public moment when its results meet the world.

Save your spot

Registration is free through Zephy, with an optional donation supporting NAP's research and education work. Register here. You'll get the Zoom link and a calendar invite, plus access to the recording if you can't make it live. (We'd still encourage you to make the live session if you can — the Q&A is where the most useful conversation happens.)

We'd love to see you there.

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