Cannabis Beverage of the Week: Nowadays stands out in a crowded field of THC drinks

Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage (or food) that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.

The good news is, thanks to the Farm Bill of 2018 and some hemp processing breakthroughs, you can legally get cannabis across the United States. The bad news is, well, it may not remain that way for long.

But, for now, there’s an easy way to get at least a little THC in your life without too much hassle. Most of these products are exactly what you’d expect. A few edibles and a lot of seltzers. Lime seltzers. Mango seltzers. Anything White Claw did 10 years ago, the cannabis industry is taking on now.

Fortunately, not all these products are created equally. Nowadays isn’t alone in treating cannabinoids like spirits to be doled out a shot at a time, but (spoiler alert) the company’s ability to minimize the endemic herbal taste of hemp-derived THC may be the best in the business.

I drank a shot’s worth of Nowadays’ five milligrams of THC formula — some nights slightly more — each day for a week. What I got, as promised, was a gentle floating buzz and no hangover. I never thought I was high by any means, but it did seem to turn the volume down on my anxiety.

More importantly, it helped clear my head before falling asleep, whisking me off to a week of vivid, fun dreams. I remember very few of them, but that’s fine because no one wants to hear about them anyway. Let’s try Nowadays’ lineup stuff and dig a little deeper.