Before making it into a shiny blue can, hangover preventative Dodge was a little, well, dodgy.
“When Braeden [Leahy] first sent me a sample, which was very pre-Dodge, it was in little capsules,” says Alec Balcombe, Leahy’s Dodge co-founder. The prototype was a homespun remedy of ingredients like ginger and Asian pear juice, designed only for friends staring down 30 with increasingly bleary eyes.
“We were beginning to understand how difficult it was to manage a family life and still enjoy a couple of tasty bevvos on a regular basis,” Balcombe says. “It was born out of necessity, almost.”
You use Dodge like a high street kebab. Have one at the end of a big night, and wake up feeling fine. Leahy and Balcombe claim that Dodge’s benefit is that it focuses on how the body metabolises alcohol, rather than hangover symptoms like dehydration.
“Hydration is certainly a part of a hangover, but it tends not to be the root cause – that’s the body’s inability to process all the alcohol you’re tipping in it,” Leahy says. “Alcohol metabolises and toxic metabolites – specifically, acetaldehyde – are what cause all the nastiness.”
You might have heard of hangover cures or preventatives like Bae Juice that contain Asian (or Korean) pear. Asian pear juice contains dihydromyricetin (DHM), a compound some studies suggest improve the body’s ability to metabolise alcohol, with fewer toxic effects.
Dodge includes other DHM-rich ingredients such as vine tea extract, plus complementary additions like ginger to reduce nausea and red ginseng to counter inflammation. You also get a complex of B vitamins, so Dodge ends up somewhere between Bae Juice and Berocca – but the team claims that DHM is the star of the show.
To take Dodge from kitchen cure to the consumer, Leahy and Balcombe took their formula to Monash University’s Food Innovation Centre. The duo had worked with the institution before, producing a confectionery called Yumm!. This time, Monash Food assisted them in turning those capsules into a drink, workshopping ingredient quantities and turning it all into a marketable product that began gradually launching across the country in mid-2022.
It’s important to note that while the Monash Food team endorses Dodge and believes in the effectiveness of the ingredients used (relying on published studies to that effect), it hasn’t been clinically tested.
“We’ve run non-clinical trials,” says Leahy. “We got groups of university students, friends, family of the research team, people around the university [and said] ‘Hey, here are 20 samples, when you have a few drinks next, knock one of these back and see how you go.’”
The result of collaboration with Monash is a nice enough non-carbonated drink with a somewhat ginger-lemon flavour profile. It’s not medicine, and according to Leahy and Balcombe, there’s no danger in drinking more than one in a night. And, while they recommend knocking it down post-session to keep the morning blues away, there’s no clinical data to suggest that you have to follow their instructions. Some people have been cutting out the middleman and mixing it directly with their spirit of choice, for instance.
So then: does it work? For science, I had a jug of pale ale, a fairly strong can of hazy IPA and half a bottle of Côtes du Rhône. I dutifully took my Dodge pre-bed and woke up fine the next day. But then, I almost always do, so I guess it’s not for me to judge.
Did I drink enough to warrant a hangover? Would Dodge have been better than the bottle of water I normally consume to stave off a hangover? All of which is to say that, without clinical studies, judging the effectiveness of a product like Dodge is almost always down to anecdotal evidence and variables such as alcohol tolerance and personal hangover experiences.
Dodge is available at good bottle shops and retails for $18 per four-pack.
