Could a THC Drink Actually Replace Your Evening Drink?

Could a THC Drink Actually Replace Your Evening Drink?

Here's What 5,000+ Real People Found

Real-world data on swapping alcohol for a cannabis beverage — and what study participants said about Fresh Press and SHAKE.

There's a version of this story almost every one of our customers tells us at some point. It's a Friday. The first drink felt great — earned, even, after a long week. The second one went down easy. But by the time the evening winds down, something has shifted. Sleep comes in fits. You wake up earlier than you wanted to, a little foggy, a little heavier than the night seemed to justify. And somewhere in that early-morning haze, a quiet question shows up: is this really the trade I want to keep making?

If you've had that thought, you are not alone, and you are not imagining the trade-off. More and more people are asking the same question — and a growing number of them are reaching for a cannabis beverage as the answer. Not as a one-time novelty, and not as a way to "get high" instead of getting drunk, but as a genuine swap for the drink that used to anchor the evening.

For years, the only thing anyone could offer that person was a story. We had plenty of them — our own founder's, our customers' in Minnesota and across the country. What we didn't have was data. That's finally changed, and the people behind the largest study of its kind are walking through the numbers in a free public webinar tomorrow, Thursday, June 4, 2026. If you've been cannabis-curious — or alcohol-curious in the other direction — this is the hour to spend. Save your free spot here.

Here's what the research found, what it means for your own glass, and why we think it matters.

 

 

The way people think about drinking has changed — fast

If you've glanced at the wellness conversation over the last few years, you've watched the ground move. "Sober curious" went from an obscure phrase to a category that grocery buyers now plan their shelves around. Dry January spilled into Damp February, then a year-round rethink of how much people actually want to drink, and when, and why. In 2025, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory connecting alcohol consumption to increased cancer risk — a piece of guidance that pushed a lot of casual drinkers to reconsider their long-term relationship with the bottle.

What's been missing from all of this isn't motivation. It's a satisfying answer to a simple question: what do I drink instead?

The non-alcoholic beer aisle has grown, but a lot of those options hand you the calories and the bitterness without the part you were actually after — the shift in the evening, the exhale. Mocktails are lovely to hold and photograph well, but they don't change how the night feels. Kombucha is delicious and does its own thing, but it isn't what most people are reaching for at 7 p.m. on a Friday.

This is the gap a well-made cannabis beverage steps into — and it's a different category entirely.

 

 

Why a cannabis beverage isn't just "another N/A drink"

A thoughtfully formulated, responsibly dosed cannabis beverage offers something the alcohol-free aisle generally can't: a relaxed, social, present-feeling shift in the evening, without the parts most people would happily leave behind. No next-morning fog reported by the people drinking it. No 2 a.m. wake-up. No tolerance creep. No 7 a.m. math on whether you need coffee, a nap, or both.

That's the experience 23rd State has been building since day one — and it's the experience the research now measures at scale. The point isn't to trade one intoxicant for another. The point is that a lot of people, given a good option, would rather end the day feeling calm and clear-headed the next morning than chase the specific buzz alcohol provides. The study put that idea to the test in the realest setting there is: people's actual lives.

 

 

The largest real-world infused beverage study to date

 

 

The data we keep pointing to comes from the Real-World Infused Beverage Study run by MoreBetter — the most comprehensive consumer dataset that exists for this category, and the reason so many people across the industry have started organizing their thinking around it.

The scope is what makes it different. More than 5,000 participants across two cohorts. 20 brands included. Multi-week tracking of how each person actually used the products in daily life — when they drank them, how often, in which settings, and what they swapped out as a result. This isn't lab data or a one-afternoon focus group. It's real consumers, in their own homes, drinking real beverages on ordinary Tuesdays, then telling researchers exactly what happened.

A quick, honest note on what that means: this is an observational, real-world study, not a clinical trial. It captures what participants chose to do and what they reported experiencing — which is exactly the kind of evidence that's useful if you're a regular person weighing this swap, rather than a lab technician. As with anything, individual results vary. What the study gives us is a picture of how thousands of people behaved when a quality cannabis beverage was actually in the fridge.

 

 

The questions the study answers — from a drinker's point of view

What we love about this research is that it asks the questions a curious customer would actually ask. Not abstract pharmacology, but the practical stuff:

How often did participants reach for the infused beverage instead of alcohol in a given week? In which settings did the swap happen — solo on the couch, with a partner over dinner, at a gathering, at the end of a brutal workday? Did their reported daily alcohol consumption actually go down once a cannabis beverage was an option? What kind of alcohol did they end up replacing — the beer, the wine, the cocktail, the nightcap? And the one that matters most: did the cannabis beverage feel good enough to stick, or did people drift back to old habits?

The June 4 webinar walks through what the data shows on every one of those questions, and then it gets specific about individual products — which is where two of ours come in.

 

 

How Fresh Press performed: the everyday swap

 

 

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

We built the Perry variant — pear-forward, dry, lightly effervescent — because pear drinks like wine without trying to be wine. It pairs with food the way a good cider would, and it holds its own with nothing else in the glass. We think of it as the easy, everyday alcohol swap.

In Cohort 2 of the MoreBetter study, Fresh Press Perry was one of the products with results called out directly. Read these slowly, because they deserve it:

  • 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 a regular replacement for alcohol.

Sit with that for a second. More than half of the people in that group — people who walked in with established drinking habits, drinks they genuinely liked, social patterns built around a glass of something — told researchers that after spending real 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 curiosity. A replacement.

For a brand whose entire reason for existing is to offer a research-validated alcohol alternative, those are exactly the numbers we've been working toward — and they came from how participants actually felt, not from anything we told them to feel.

 

 

How SHAKE fits in: the social-occasion swap

If Fresh Press is the easy weeknight swap, SHAKE is the answer to the harder one.

Most "drinking less" advice is built around the random Tuesday — the casual, at-home moment where skipping a drink barely registers. But for a lot of people, the genuinely difficult substitution is the social one. The dinner party. The wedding. The work dinner where everyone else is on their second martini and you don't want to be the person holding a glass of water explaining yourself.

That's the moment SHAKE was designed for. Our edible glitter drops turn an ordinary glass into something that looks and feels like an occasion — shimmering, festive, something you'd actually want to be seen holding. It behaves like an aperitif in the conversation and delivers a relaxed lift that fits the room. It's the product that lets you say yes to the event without saying yes to the next-morning version of the event. (SHAKE comes in three finishes — Emerald, Cosmo Pink, and 24K Gold — if you want to match the vibe of whatever you're celebrating.)

In the study, SHAKE was part of the same Cohort 2 lineup that landed two findings we're especially proud of — findings that held across every 23rd State product included.

 

 

The two findings that held across the whole lineup

 

 

Two results from Cohort 2 applied to every one of our products in the study, and they speak directly to the things drinkers worry about most:

  • More than 80% of participants said our products were safer than alcohol for their health. Every single 23rd State product in the cohort cleared that bar. (To be precise about what that means: this reflects what participants reported believing about their own experience — it isn't a medical claim from us.)
  • Every product was statistically unlikely to produce a hangover the next day. If you've ever woken up at 6:45 a.m. with cottonmouth and a 9 a.m. meeting, you already know that's not a small thing.

Those two findings get at the heart of why people make this swap and why they tend to stay. The relief isn't only in the evening — it's in the morning that follows.

 

 

What the data actually means for your evening

 

 

Here's the part that matters most if you're reading this not as a researcher or a retailer, but as a person quietly wondering about your own habits.

The comparison between cannabis and alcohol, on the dimensions scientists actually study, has been fairly clear for a while. Alcohol is one of the most harmful substances regularly consumed in this country, and the alcohol-cancer link — now formally acknowledged in that 2025 Surgeon General advisory — is enough on its own to make a lot of people reconsider what they want their long-term relationship with drinking to look like.

What's genuinely new is the consumer-behavior layer sitting on top of that. The open question was never really the pharmacology — it was the lived one: given a high-quality cannabis beverage, would real people actually choose it over the drink they were used to? Would the swap feel good enough to last?

The study's answer is a measured but real yes — and especially when the product is well-designed. Participants reported reaching for cannabis beverages in place of alcohol, reported drinking less alcohol during the product-use phases than before, and reported preferring the experience. That moves the cannabis-as-alcohol-alternative conversation out of wellness-blog speculation and into documented behavior across thousands of people who, given the choice, opted in.

It doesn't mean a cannabis beverage is right for everyone, and it isn't a promise about how any one night will go for you. It means the option is real, the data behind it is real, and you don't have to take a brand's word for it anymore. All 23rd State products are intended for adults 21 and older.

 

 

The hosts: science you can actually trust

We want to be clear about who's running tomorrow's session, because the messengers matter as much as the message.

The Network of Applied Pharmacognosy (NAP) is a nonprofit research and education organization founded by Dr. Miyabe Shields and Dr. Riley Kirk — two researchers who've built rare credibility translating complicated cannabinoid science into language consumers and operators can actually use. If you've followed either of them, you know they don't deal in hype. They cite their sources and push back on overstatements from inside the industry as readily as from outside it.

MoreBetter built the privacy-protected, brand-agnostic research infrastructure that makes a study at this scale possible — the methodology that turns 5,000 individual experiences into something an entire field can build on.

This isn't a sponsor pitch dressed up as research. It's a science-led conversation about what the evidence shows, with 23rd State along as one of the featured brands whose products were studied.

 

 

What you'll walk away with — and how to join

The webinar runs 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. ET on Thursday, June 4, 2026 — roughly 30 minutes of structured content, followed by 15 minutes of live audience Q&A, which in our experience is where the most useful conversation always happens. It's hosted on Zoom, and registration is completely free through Zeffy (with an optional donation that supports NAP's ongoing research and education work).

By the end of the hour, you'll have a clear picture of who participated and what brought them to the study, how alcohol use looked across the group at baseline, the actual substitution behavior the researchers captured, how reported daily drinking shifted once a cannabis beverage was in the picture, and where Fresh Press, SHAKE, and the rest of our Cohort 2 lineup landed on the safety and hangover-likelihood measures.

It's built for anyone who's curious — drinkers and non-drinkers, sober-curious folks rethinking their habits, brand operators, retailers, and researchers alike.

👉 Register free 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 nudge you toward the live session — that Q&A is worth showing up for.)

 

 

A note from the family behind 23rd State

23rd State exists because of a personal need. Our founder, Leah, 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, those trade-offs weren't just unpleasant — they were genuinely incompatible with the life she wanted. So she built the thing she was looking for. (Minnesota, fittingly, became the 23rd state to legalize adult-use cannabis — which is where our name comes from.)

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

We've staked a lot on independent research as the foundation for this brand, because we think consumers deserve real data — not marketing claims dressed up as evidence. Tomorrow's webinar is the public moment when that data meets the world, and we'd genuinely love to have you in the room.

 

 

Recommended

 

 

Curious to try it before the webinar? Browse the full lineup here, or find 23rd State at a retailer near you. New to cannabis beverages? Our research and science hub walks through everything we've learned in five years of building this brand. And if you want the deeper dive on the study, here's our original breakdown: Cannabis vs. alcohol: what 5,000+ consumers said about swapping their drink.

For adults 21+. These statements reflect participant-reported experiences from an observational, real-world study and have not been evaluated by the FDA. This content is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Individual results vary.

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