Dispensary trailblazer Dustin Johnson is back with a groundbreaking non-alcoholic “beer-inspired beverage.”
When a buddy went sober after the pandemic and started bringing non-alcoholic beers around, Dustin Johnson gamely gave a few a try – and wasn’t impressed. Too flaccid, too watery, not enough flavor. Delving into the economics of N/A beer, the Scottsdale businessman also deemed prevailing brewing methods crude and inefficient. “Traditionally [with N/A products], people brew a full-strength beer and then dealcoholize it… essentially, burn it off,” he says. “It seemed like a strange process to me.” A first-wave Arizona cannabis entrepreneur who built Monarch Dispensary into a $10 million company before selling it in 2018, Johnson thought he could do better. And he had the perfect name for an Arizona beer that’s not quite beer: Rhinestone Extra Light.
Wishing to remove dealcoholization – and, for that matter, brewing itself – from the equation, Johnson reached out to 100-year-old Missouri food giant Beck Flavors with a singular request: Create a perfect beer-flavored extract. “They said, ‘We’ll give it a try,’” he says.
Armed with three natural flavor extracts – Blood Orange, Desert Grapefruit and Mexican Lime – Johnson went to work finding an ingredient to synthesize the body and mouthfeel of beer. He found it in sorghum, a gluten-free cereal grain.
Next up: experimenting with ratios and ingredients. A pinch of salt here. A bit more sorghum there. Last year, Johnson started taking cans of his 0 percent ABV beverage to parties to see how quickly a given prototype would disappear from coolers.
Settling on the final recipes, Johnson called up his friends at The Shop Beer Co. to do the canning, submitting samples to Sprouts Farmers Market as part of a marketing trial for local products. Rhinestone was accepted and will appear on Sprouts shelves just in time for Dry January. “We’re here for folks who want to be sober for five minutes, between margaritas or a whole year,” Johnson says.
Rhinestone Extra Light
$12/six-pack
Available at Total Wine, Trevor’s Liquor and other retailers, or online at drinkrhinestone.com
Beer of the Month
Mudshark Brewery Trippin
Spiced IPA/7% ABV/41 IBU
Our favorite category at the Arizona Craft Beer Awards, which PHOENIX magazine has sponsored since its birth four years ago: “Experimental IPA.” It just conjures fun images – like, brewers in white lab coats testing cancer-fighting cold-hopping techniques. This offering from Lake Havasu-based Mudshark is just as fun – a golden, clear and smooth IPA imbued with honey and habanero, and goodly portions of what we assume are Citra and Mosaic hops for tropical firmness. No wonder Trippin won gold at the 2025 ACBA for Experimental IPA. We’ll participate in that clinical trial all day long. mudsharkbrewery.com
