The original Spaghett goes like this: Take a big swig of an ice-cold Miller High Life (long-neck bottle, please), then replace that swig with a couple glugs of Aperol and a squeeze of lemon. Do the same thing with Campari and it’s a Camparty. Swap High Life for Pabst and it’s a Nascar Spritz. You get the idea.
The built-in-bottle beer spritz takes a drink that was already unfussy to begin with (the spritz; measure if you must, but really… ) and makes it truly down for whatever. Admittedly, it was not the first drink that came to mind when considering what might easily transition to N/A. Yet when Punch’s art director, Lizzie Munro, revealed that her go-to weeknight drink while training for the New York City Marathon was effectively an N/A Spaghett—the Italian bitter soda Stappi combined with a nonalcoholic pilsner—it cracked a code for me.
My go-to when I am not drinking is an N/A beer. In the arms race to own nonalcoholic, brewers are ahead of the game. N/A beer satisfies the craving to punctuate the end of the day: It’s refreshing, it’s reliable. But integrate this into your routine a few nights a week, and suddenly you find yourself wanting something more. But not too much more. In fact, the unfussy allure of the Spaghett is precisely what I am looking for on a Tuesday. And it’s more than just an N/A analogue; I’d argue it may even be an improvement on the original.
The genius of the combo, all credit to Lizzie, is combining two bubbly ingredients. My gripe with the beer spritz is the way in which a liqueur can blunt the effervescence of the beer and, when it’s not ice-cold, render it cloying. Stappi keeps it energetic. Add citrus if you like (grapefruit and it’s a bitter shandy, lemon and you stay within the bounds of the original), or leave it out and adjust the ratio of Stappi to pilsner to your liking, and go forth with confidence. I like to split one cold bottle of Stappi between two cans of a light lager (Untitled Art Italian Pilsner or Athletic Lite), but dumping them both into a big glass over ice works just as well; don’t overthink it. Like the original spritz and its beer-based offshoots, the N/A Spaghett is a soft-hearted drink.