Innovation

Vice:

How I Felt After Binge-Drinking 'Hangover-Free' Alcohol

Sydney scientist Colin Dahl claims to have invented hangover-free alcohol. I put his drinks to the test

OPPIL is a cocktail bar situated at the north end of King Street, the main artery of Sydney’s Inner West. What makes the bar special is not what it claims to do, but what it claims not to do. OPPIL claims their cocktails won’t give you a hangover, which sounds too good to be true. What goes up must come down and what goes down must come up into the toilet the next morning: surely these are the laws of the universe.

I had to know more.

To my great excitement, OPPIL offered me two nights of solid drinking to test the veracity of their claims. I’d spend one night drinking regular booze, and another night drinking the potential booze of the future. I wouldn’t know which night was which, but hopefully the effects would be made clear the next morning.

Colin Dahl is the founder of OPPIL. He comes from an engineering background, and was cautious about the integrity of our randomised test, so he provided me with a sealed envelope that contained the results. I then signed the envelope and tucked it away.

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Dahl stumbled across the idea for hangover-free wine while working on a treatment for rosacea, which is that red flush people sometimes get on their faces when drinking, which is caused by an inherited deficiency in one of the enzymes responsible for the breakdown of alcohol: aldehyde dehydrogenase.

Dahl discovered that by increasing levels of antioxidants in alcoholic beverages with concentrated grape extract, he was able to assist the body’s metabolisation of alcohol. Trying the new booze on himself, he noticed something else: he didn’t have a hangover. Excited, he spent the next three years refining the process into a commercial product.

“We've just infused it with red grapes,” he explains. “We suspect that antioxidants are getting transferred, because that's the only thing we can think of that might be balancing the toxicity of ethanol byproducts.”

He believes that antioxidants from grapes neutralise the free radicals secreted by your liver as alcohol gets broken down, resulting in a nullified hangover.

Just tell me what I have to do to sign up for the clinical trials.